


The Interrogation

by magdaliny



Series: Notebook No. 6 [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Diary/Journal, Epistolary, Illustrated, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-25 01:44:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 51,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14368212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdaliny/pseuds/magdaliny
Summary: There's a story and it goes like this.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Показания](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15681705) by [apharti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/apharti/pseuds/apharti), [fandom_Starbucks_Roles_TwoSexyMen_2018](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandom_Starbucks_Roles_TwoSexyMen_2018/pseuds/fandom_Starbucks_Roles_TwoSexyMen_2018)



> **This fic has illustrations!** Everything is scaled to work on mobile. If you want to download rather than read in your browser, PDF or HTML works best; the images may not appear on your e-reader if you download it in epub or mobi. All plot-relevant text is captioned just in case.

 

 

 

There's a story and it goes like this.

Once a long long time ago there lived a righteous man. People called him Honi the Circle-Drawer and that's because one time during a drought he drew a circle and stood in it and said to God I'm not getting out of this circle until you make it rain. God made it rain a little and Honi said no that's not good enough, so God made it rain a lot and Honi said no that's too much, and then God made it rain just enough and Honi said perfect. After that folks didn't even thank him and they yelled at him to stop the rain because human entitlement's as old as language I guess. But that's not the story.

See Honi his whole life he was obsessed with this one verse and the verse went: When the Lord brought back those who returned to Zion we were like dreamers. What this probably means is that after the Jews got exiled to Babylon for almost a century they probably came back to Jerusalem kind of staggery and dazed, but what Honi kept asking himself was how it was possible for all those years to feel like a dream. How could anybody sleep for that long he wondered. Well one day Honi's going along the road when he sees a guy planting a carob tree, and he says how long does it take one of those to make fruit? And the guy says seventy years. Honi being kind of a jerk-off he says are you sure you'll be here in seventy years to enjoy it? And the guy says as how he wouldn't be able to eat carob today if his grandpa hadn't planted carob trees when he was coming up, so get lost.

Honi does indeed get lost and he eats some food and then he falls asleep, and when he wakes up something's funny. There's a great big carob tree where there used to be just a little sapling. Honi goes over and asks the guy harvesting the carob whether he's the guy who just planted it and the guy says no, that was my grandpa. Honi being a clever guy he goes well good God almighty then I must've fallen asleep for seventy years. He goes home and asks if the son of Honi the Circle-Drawer is still alive and folks tell him no but his grandson is, and Honi says: that's me, I'm Honi! But nobody recognizes him. And he goes to the school and wouldn't you know it but they're talking about him there and the scholars are saying how he was so clever he used to solve everybody's problems. I'm Honi! Honi says, and that poor sorry son of a bitch but nobody believes him after all this time because there's nobody left who knew him, so he prays for death. And he dies.

Now when Becks and I were kids this is when we stopped our ma and said what the fuck? All right we didn't say that exactly but we sure as hell thought it. Between the two of us we could not begin to figure out why anybody would want to die if they fell asleep and missed a bunch of stuff. Me especially I thought he was an idiot because of course everyone wants a chance to see the future. Well Momma explained that when you come to a place where nobody knows you and nobody remembers you and nobody believes you when you say who you are, that's sort of like death anyway. She explained how one of the rebbes said the moral of the story was that there's worse things than dying and sometimes you're better off dead than alone. And hell if that isn't the theme song of the Jewish people I don't know what is, but back then me and Becks laughed and said a seventy year nap sounds all right to me. Back then we thought the worst thing that could happen to you was dying.

Point I'm trying to make is our momma was right and the rebbes were right and the story's right too. I guess in a way I'm a moral story my own self. Bucky Barnes: The Kid Who Laughed. Well I laughed at Honi's pain and let me tell you I learned my lesson but good. Seems to me Honi got off easy though. I wish I'd only slept for seventy years. I wish I'd only been forgotten. There's things out there worse than dying, sweetheart.

I'm one of them.

 

* * *

 

 

I woke up on the bank of the Potomac about four miles downstream and I thought oh hell now what.

That's a lie; I didn't think that at all. But that's what I'd write if I was aiming to tell it like a story. That's how it felt, even if I didn't use those words in that order, ticker tape reeling slow out of that empty space between my ears. Already growing back by then although I wouldn't know it for a week. Six days I'd spend forgetting—forgetting where I was, where I'd been, if I'd eaten, if I'd slept, and then finally I had a lucid enough stretch that I went and stole the first of the notebooks from a bookshop in Bangor. Recorded dates and hours and every time I so much as took a leak. Looking back on that first notebook gives me the crawling horrors. It wasn't a personlike thing at all, not a scrap of soul in it, not for weeks, not until the first time I used an adjective and scared myself so bad I threw it across the warehouse where I was squatting sleepless at some stupid hour before dawn. That's a lie too. I know it was 3:56am and I know because I wrote it down. But it wasn't a thing a person would do, not for thirty-eight whole days and nights while I flinched and sweated and scuttled around the edges of things, the edges of me. It was an animal thing. Not a thing an animal would do but a thing you'd do for an animal. A veterinarian was what I was or a zookeeper. 7:12am water consumed 18oz. 8:41pm white rice consumed 400g. 9:19pm: vomited no blood present. Like that. Just like that.

Way I see it you can only start judging me, if you can judge me at all, after those thirty-eight days've run their course, because I wasn't any sort of human then. No, don't start: I wasn't. I mean to start with my genes aren't even homo sapiens, not anymore. Haven't been since 1943 if I had to take a guess. The fifties at the outside, although that's one thing I'll never know, not now that the little freak's disintegrated himself with a missile. I say himself; that wasn't really human either if you think about it. What was left of him. Like father like son. I'll spare you the old joke about Frankenstein. It's not relevant anyway.

My point is that I wasn't quite a human being. I wasn't even properly an animal either, because animals roost and rut and they'll choose food over fear and most of all I think they've got a kind of rough altruism that means they understand me and them, the lines between things and the lines connecting them and what to do about it. If anything I was a program. A simple neural package nobody'd bothered to test before it wriggled its way onto the network. Lost little worm. Come to think of it they might've had me downloaded as a program somewhere. If they'd uploaded the freak then surely they could've uploaded me too. That's not a nice thought, is it? A hungry ghost stuck on a hard drive somewhere asleep and alone. Imagine if somebody found it. Imagine if somebody turned it on. What would it be, that old scared scan of old scarred me? It wouldn't be human that's for damn sure. But it wouldn't not be, either.

That's what I'm trying to say I guess. That I wasn't human and I wasn't not and there was a lot of weeks where that was true, where the boundaries were feathery and I was a proto-person, writing down date and time and urine color like a fretful rancher with one sick cow. If true's the right word. Hell, all right: it's the right word because I say it is. Damn subjectivity. There. I feel better. I feel better now I mean. Back then I don't think there was anything in the whole world that could've made me feel better, could've sped up that process, coming to the place where I could—not understand I suppose but begin to get what understanding even was, what it felt like in the thing I was slowly figuring out wasn't an extension of a gun, a tool for conveying and converting calories into energy; a body, I mean. That was mine. Not mine because I'd killed it and dragged it back to my den for later. Mine because it was given to me. Mine because my mother grew my skin for me, turned calcium into bones in her belly for me. For a wee red terror she wouldn't meet for eight and a half troublesome months as I turned and kicked and rode high, never letting her have a moment of rest or a full breath until I took the first of my own. I didn't cry. Someone told me that once when I was young and it's stuck in my head ever since but I never have been able to remember who said it. An aunt. A cousin. My mother, maybe. Someone who meant well. I'd like to go back and tell them I didn't cry when I fell, when they broke me, when they tied the strap around my arm, when they were knocking my teeth out so I couldn't bite down. But then I'd be lying.

It's a habit.

 

* * *

 

Is it hard to believe that somebody loved me?

 

* * *

 

~~When I was in Jakarta the~~

Listen to me. Now I probably sound like every other white asshole going abroad to find themselves. Trouble with that kind of person is they who know they are and they just don't like it. Finding themselves. Shit. Losing themselves more like. Well maybe you could say I was trying to find myself but that wasn't how I thought of it at the time. Not that I was thinking much of anything at all. If anything you could say I was trying to find a self. My self, I didn't have one of those yet, or at least not a sense of ownership, not something I felt I could grasp or describe or feel in my body. Not a solid thing at all. And anyway I'm not white, or I'm only white under the right conditions, or when it's convenient for other folks, in the way of my momma's people. Did you know Jews don't believe in hell? Or in much of anything after death for that matter. Someone had to come up with an idea because people were getting anxious. I think that's funny. The maybe-land they came up with is called gehenna and the story goes it means the place where we burn our garbage. Once a long long time ago somebody asked: where do people go when they die? And a rabbi said: back to God I guess. And they asked: but where do they go if they're bad? And the rabbi said: you stand over there until you're sorry.

I was talking about Jakarta. Jakarta was a lot like that. It smelled of a whole host of things I didn't have the names for then, and still don't to be honest with you, but mostly it smelled of smoke and it was hot, hot, hot. That's what I remember most: the heat. I'd like to say I remember how good the food was or how kind the people were but I'd be making it all up. Just the smoke and the heat and me, laying the planks that might one day let me stand somewhere and be sorry.

How it was I got there I couldn't tell you exactly. I just knew I had to get the hell out of the States. I know I took a boat because God love the TSA but there wasn't any way me and my metal bones were ever going to find their way onto a plane. I say bones; I'm made of meat and marrow same as anybody but I've got enough metal holding me together that they may as well be. Smack me and I'll ring like a gong. In one hotel or another along the way, couldn't say where, I saw a film on the television where a magic suit of armor gets itself shot by a machine gun, but since it was magic it didn't slow it down none, not until its legs filled up with lead. That's what I feel like sometimes. A clinking clanking vagabond thing. Marley's ghost. Well I haunted that ship for forty days and nights according to the first notebook and for those few weeks I ate better than I had been and better than I would for a good while after. If you're going to haunt a thing at all it's worth your while to haunt a cruise ship. Big as a city and parties on every deck every night and the staff so consumed with trying to keep all them drunk tourists from going overboard that I doubt a single person noticed the dent I made in their stores. I got off in Singapore and the next thing I knew was Jakarta.

That happened a lot in the early days. In Mongolia the widow-woman told me they train their horses so good they can carry drunk men home and finish bringing in the goats if their rider falls asleep at the wheel. Some of them are so good the herders let them do most of the job themselves; rider's only there for his thumbs on the catch-pole. If you get trained as good as me then your body's that kind of horse. You fall asleep and let it run and it'll take you somewhere safe. Maybe you've lost something and maybe you're confused and maybe you nearly die of thirst when it dumps you in the dirt and gives you back the reins, but you don't have to be there for the journey. Horse knows what to do.

What I'm trying to say is Jakarta wasn't any kind of fun. I know now Indonesia's a swinging place, a modern place, a hub of culture where rich young people go to have a good time and sow their wild oats. I guess it's a lot like Brazil when I was coming up; we used to listen to the Rudy Vallee show and hear the sambas in our sleep. Now the East seems like the place you want to be. Most of the music festivals in Asia get held in Jakarta as I'd find out later and it seemed to me then that every one of them was being held at once, days and nights of hell-raising noise and beautiful people dancing on balconies. I never once saw the stars. Revelry and fireworks and thousands of people singing through till dawn: you bet I was a shaking, stupid mess. Time was you couldn't keep me from dancing, my feet on the streets of the city moving with any beat I heard. I used to feel it in my thin young bones. Maybe someday when it's safe I'll go back there and join them and we'll move our bodies together and no one will care that mine's not like theirs. That's a hell of a nice thought, even if it'll never happen. I don't mind writing that down.

 

* * *

 

For a long while I avoided the news but lately I've been trying to catch up on it. It's good to know what they're saying about you. Today I hear they're calling us metahumans now. People like me. I don't fancy it at all. I looked it up, is what I mean, because I didn't know what in hell it was supposed to be saying, but it just doesn't make any sense. We're not some kind of cleverdick self-referential joke, we're not an analogy, we're not more. Some people say well they transcend humanity. What a load of bull. That meaning's a back-formation for a start and if you're going to play that game you may as well make up a whole new damn vocabulary. Anyway that's the same logic the other folks use, the ones who don't like metahuman either and say posthuman. Same difference. Say mutant for God's sake. We got rebellious bodies is what they mean. Bodies that don't follow the rules. What folks need to go on and ask themselves isn't what to call us but why they got a need to call us anything at all. Who made up all them rules, sunshine? Who set the standard? People say this century's moved fast but I'm telling you the world hasn't changed. Me and all the queens of New York asking ourselves the same question in 1939: the world hasn't changed at all.

Worse, some folks say we're all of us posthuman now. Just on account of us living in the Computer Age. Something about how information doesn't have to live in a body these days, whether that body's a person or a book or lines scratched on a rock, and how when we access that airy stuff we become it, a little. Like putting on a prosthetic. The thing and the representation of the thing. Sounds like a grand reinvention of Plato's Cave if you ask me and also like folks have a hard-on about the idea of being special without really knowing anything about it. Being different? It's not special. It's sink or swim and the pool is always built by somebody else. You never wonder what happened to the Neanderthals?

They died, sweetheart. They died.

 

* * *

 

Nice thing about keeping notes is how you can go back and say hey look that's what I was thinking right then. Bad thing about keeping notes is you can see plain as day when you're avoiding something. I have to get through Jakarta or I can't talk about Mongolia and Mongolia's where things happened to me that weren't awful for the first time in about a hundred years.

But you understand I got to get through the bad parts first.

Around then all I knew was the animal time. America was the zookeeper time where I was looking after matters but I wasn't in them. Animal time's when you figure out the difference between you and things that aren't you and why that distinction means anything at all when you're aiming to rebuild a person from spare parts. It starts slow and it's slow for a long time. Take a kid raised by dogs and try to teach her how to dress to impress and she'll eat that blouse right out of your hand. You got to teach her why, first. You got to make her understand why it matters. Well I sure as shit didn't have anybody in my corner showing me the right way of things, and although I could speak the language I couldn't really speak it, if you know what I mean. I don't know if they put all those languages in me or if they just made it so I learned them quick as anything, but I could communicate anywhere I went. I never heard a tongue I couldn't put in my own mouth. Sounds like a blessing but let me tell you people get awful confused when you talk like a native and act like you've just beamed down from Mars. Last thing you want when you're trying to disappear is confusion. People'll forget anger and they'll forget niceness but unsolved questions are about the worst seeds you can plant.

Those are the main reasons I left Jakarta, but there was also the fever. God only knows what kind of sickness it was. Maybe I finally ate the wrong kind of raw meat or drank the wrong kind of water when the horse took over and dragged me down into that dark place where anything looks like food. Plenty of times I woke up with dirt around my mouth and gritting between my teeth and I don't like thinking about what was crawling around in that. Maybe it was some kind of infection from all the shit they put inside me. Maybe I picked up something humans've got immunity for but things like me don't. Or maybe I cooked up my own illness, like the way some of that antibacterial stuff's just making worse bugs by only killing the weak ones. Hell, maybe it wasn't even physical; maybe it was one of them old-timey brain fevers folks in books were always dying of back before they figured out mono. Don't really matter. Point is I got sick as the proverbial dog and I came to figure eventually that maybe the heat wasn't doing me any favors, so I went north.

Now me I've never been a tough customer. People were always saying I was a sensitive boy when I was coming up, growing so fast my voice couldn't ever keep pace with my feelings. It shivered and cracked long into my teens and the harder I tried to make it roll deep-watered like Da the harder my needle skipped. I cried at the movie palace and when my momma said goodnight. I cried when I got my Class One and when my number came up. Becks said I was brave but I sure as hell didn't feel it, twisting my orders in my sweaty hands and wondering whether I was really going to get sent over there, whether the Germans would whip out another Zimmerman and haul us teeth-first into their damn fool war. Turns out I didn't get so much as a papercut. Turns out I should've been a lot more worried about whether some clammy-handed little psychopath was going to turn me into a science experiment. Funny old world sometimes.

But thing is everybody's got their baseline. A year, seventy years, don't matter. Everybody's got things in themselves that don't change from cradle to grave no matter how much trouble and shame and shocks to the head a person gets in the meanwhile. And about halfway up to the place I didn't know I was going yet, a lot of that started coming back to me in a widdershins kind of way that meant it didn't feel like mine at all, like it was just some new symptom of the sickness I was trying my damnedest to pretend wasn't getting worse. Sweating nights and crying out for the person I didn't know yet was my ma. Poor woman. Turning in her grave at the sound of me putting fear into the hearts of farmers from Palembang to Lanzhou. Turning in her grave at the sight of me if she'd seen me then. Her blue-eyed boychik turned cadaverous mountain man. Never once got lice though, or fleas or ticks or biting things of any kind at all. Fact is they tried. First time I woke up to a circle of little black bodies around my nest I cried like a kid with two skinned knees for them poor dumb dead insects. Some wrongness in my blood. Guess they can't smell it on me. Maybe it's in my veins, whatever he did to me in that back room; maybe it's blood-borne. Maybe it's contagious. Maybe it'd change them if they drank from me and lived. Far as I know I'm the only one whose brain didn't boil in his skull but I know I wasn't anything close to the first. Wouldn't that be something. Supermosquitoes. Perish the fucking thought.

After all that it's no wonder the first things that made me start thinking like a human being again were animals. I was more than half an animal still by the time I wandered out onto the steppes with no drive left in my head but north, stripping grains from grasses with my teeth and trying to decide if I was predator or prey: flinching at honeybees and spitting and snarling at a fox half a mile off. Scareder and scareder and oh Lord have mercy was I sick. I wasn't going to people for help and I sincerely doubt they would've helped me if I had. Thick yellow crust leaking from my eyes and snot in my beard. Raving in ten languages about the people following me and the doctors who'd taken my organs and all the crazy shit you'd expect from a guy who looks like he has the clap and maybe a brain tumor besides. If twenty-year-old me had seen me then he'd've put his tail between his legs and ran. So it was just me out in the grasslands and after a while, the horses.

I learned later how Mongolian horse folk let their animals run wild, or as near to wild as makes no difference. You stick a stallion out there to keep charge of the herd and fight off danger, and the rest of the herd's a couple dozen or even a couple hundred mares and geldings all mixed up together like one big roving family. The horse folk don't trim their hooves or even feed them, really; the land takes care of all that. But they get brought in for roping and riding and for getting milked if they're mares and for showing off if they're stallions, so they know the touch and smell of people and their strange slow ways. I'm explaining all this because what happened was I got myself found by a herd. And what happened then was they just plain did not know what the fuck to do with me. When you're a horse I figure you got a specific box in your head for what a human being does. Humans have soft paws they're always touching you with. Humans stroke you and tie up your legs and cut your mane and milk you and ride you. Humans turn foals that come out breech. A human's a helping thing. A wanting-done thing. An upright thing. My pitiful self crawling around in the grass and shouting at God—I guess I wasn't quite what they were expecting.

If I got my dates right, which I probably don't, and if this is the right section of crazy scribblings, which it probably isn't, then maybe this was about the time I was starting to think that I was being punished. What I remember thinking about is Sarah. My second ma. Remembering her, I mean.

When she died back when it was more terrible than anything I could imagine and the worst of it was that I didn't feel sad. I suppose denial was what it was because I just couldn't make it feel real enough to get at those feelings and mourn her proper. Now I've done plenty of reading since and these days they say that's a normal way to be. They say it's especially normal when somebody dies slow and grasping and coughing up blood in a little white bed, where you do all your mourning before they die and then when they go you got nothing left. At the time I didn't know that and I thought I was the worst creature in the whole of creation for not being a broken shell of a man when Sarah up and left us. I don't know why or how I got the idea in my head, maybe I'd been hanging around too many Catholics, but I came to thinking that I ought to be punished for not feeling the way I thought I should've, so down I went to the Navy Yard one night and asked a sailor of my acquaintance to hit me. He was a good enough man but he had a mean streak and I was figuring he would maybe punch my lights out and I wouldn't have to think about the badness in me for a little while, but what happened instead was he smacked me around real sweet and then got me on my back on a pile of crates heading for Latin America; I could hear the Coke bottles rattling about when I wasn't caterwauling so loud it's a wonder nobody came around looking for the murder. And after about the best lay I'd had in my life up till then I thought well that plan sure failed, and I went home and told my sister the whole stupid mess of a story, and she said Oh Jaime you idiot. I miss her too you know. I miss her too. And we cried all over each other like a couple of old women and then we went to shul when nobody was around and said kaddish even though we probably shouldn't have, us not being a minyan and Sarah being a goy and neither of us related to her to boot, and that was that.

Point I was trying to come to is that out there with the grass and the horses and the fever I was having the punishment feeling again. The missions coming back and oh God but I knew I'd killed a lot of people. For them, for HYDRA, I guess I thought, although I don't think there was a time in the last seventy years when it occurred to me I was doing anything for anybody. Gun doesn't think about things like that. Problem being I just couldn't feel it. Could've been denial like with Sarah, but on top of that the way they'd fried my brain made everything coming back feel like one long dream, a twisty thing like a Lovecraft story and twice as strange because it was like I was reading it out of _Astounding Stories_ but it was me. James Barnes, Reanimator. I wished it was like that. I wished I could fly around the world to all those potter's fields I'd left behind me and dig up the bodies and fill up their veins with potions. I wished I could put my warm mouth on their cold mouths and breathe life back into them. I remember thinking maybe if I could see them and touch them and look into their eyes then it would feel real, or at least realer, like a thing I'd done with my own two hands.

Joke is I've only got one.

Now what you've got to go ahead and picture is me, first of all, looking like a thing three-quarters dead myself on account of not having washed for weeks or shaved for months, and my left arm overheating and grinding away because it was stuck full of silt and twigs and God knows what else, all of me gray as the underside of a sick fish, shouting at the sky in Yiddish and Russian and every angry-sounding language they put in me. And now here's this whole herd of equines following me around making noises like: what the fuck? in Horse while I stumble and rave and throw up in the grass. Hallucinating. After a while maybe it's no surprise I started thinking those horses weren't horses at all but something else. Something weirder. I don't know what. The only thing I remember from the day it happened and the thing I remember most clearly from that whole sorry time in general was I got myself convinced there'd been a mistake.

See Jews we believe that sometimes God fucks up. I'm sure that's heresy to loads of people but that's their business. God fucked up with Noah and so we had to make a covenant so God didn't go on and forget the promise not to destroy the whole world again. Mutual accountability and all that. Some folks say God fucked up with Moses a bunch of times; some folks say God fucked up making humans at all. But God's kind of a mess in other ways on account of the whole thing with the Angel of Death, because the Angel of Death is kind of terrible at its job. That's why it used to be tradition to change your kid's name if they got dreadful sick and also why it's still tradition not to name your kid after your grandpa if he's still alive, because if the Angel of Death comes around it might take wee Jimmy instead of old Jimmy and that's just a damn tragedy. There's all sorts of stories about rabbis fooling the Angel of Death too. My favorite's Rabbi Chisda because as the story goes the Angel of Death can't take somebody while they're studying holy texts, and Rabbi Chisda just wouldn't shut up. Then one day he sits down on a cedar bench, still jabbering away, and the Angel of Death makes it split under him. And Rabbi Chisda opens his mouth and for a second nothing comes out. And the Angel of Death gets him. That's the kind of shithead we're stuck with when we come to die.

So there I am out in the middle of nowhere and sick as I was sure nobody'd ever been sick in the whole history of the world, feeling sorry for myself and sorry for what I'd done and just plain sorry in general for the whole stupid bundle of everything that was my life, and what I wound up thinking was that the Angel of Death had fucked up. As it famously does. How maybe the reason I hadn't died in '43 and hadn't died in '45 and kept on not dying through the fifties and sixties and into the naughts was that maybe the Angel took the wrong guy back in the year of our Lord nineteen-whatever and then administrative errors being what they were, maybe my paperwork had gotten lost. Maybe they'd forgotten about me up there. Maybe I'd gone and done all them awful things because there was something broken inside me from not dying right, or maybe instead of getting an extra soul on shabbes like we're supposed to the freak had somehow opened the door to a wrongness, a dybbuk or a demon or something worse, or maybe I had died and nobody'd said kaddish for me and this was the place I was stuck, suffering. Those and a parcel of weirder things was what I was screaming at the sky when the horses were following me around and going what the fuck?

Mostly, though, it was me begging for God to notice me, acknowledge me, come down and fucking well fight me like a fucking man, sounding like a certain somebody I know and acting generally like a rooster with its head chopped off. Kill me, I was screaming, kill me, kill me, just fucking kill me already, and that's when I felt a pain in my chest and I dropped face-down in the grass like I'd been shot with an elephant gun.

I died, then. Technically.

 

* * *

 

Once a long long time ago there lived a little boy who wanted to be a physicist.

That's not quite true. He didn't know in particular what he wanted to be, not like his friends who knew they wanted to be firefighters or doctors or soldiers. He just knew he loved science like regular folk loved sunrises and Bette Davis and jam on their toast, and that numbers always did what he told them to, and that more than anything else he wanted to understand how the universe worked. He was reading _The Astronomical Journal_ when his pals were just dipping their toes into _Popular Science_. Everyone thought he was going to be an artist because he was good with a pen in his hand but what he wanted to do was go to Princeton. And by God he did, for a little while, until his country came calling and his number came up and they saw how good he was with equations, how he could see the wind in his head, how he always knew what the temperature was, how he could put a slug through a ring at four hundred meters, and they said: how would you like to be a marksman, son? And the boy thought: well, hell, at least I can use my brain.

They used his brain all right. They used it and used it and used it until they used it all up.

 

* * *

 

I have just plain got to stop writing in this thing when I'm feeling low.

Get over your damn self, Barnes.

 

* * *

 

The widow-woman told me once about her dead husband, how they married at seventeen and as a wedding present they got three camels and thirty-one mares and fourteen geldings and two stallions and a huge long roll of felt to waterproof their ger with. A ger's a sort of hut that people live in when they're nomad folk, with poles and a ring in the middle that everything hangs off of, and it can be big or small or closed or open depending on how you put it up. They didn't have anything besides that but they counted themselves rich because they didn't have those things the day before. They went off a little ways and put up their ger for the first time, and over nine years they had seven babies and four of them lived, and those were her four daughters. It took me a long time to learn their names because I kept forgetting. The people who made me into what I am didn't make me to be good with names; they made me be good with faces. Sometimes it's still hard for me to remember but that's another nice thing about keeping notes. I got it all right here.

Later I found out they weren't too far away while I was having my pissing match with God. Gathering dung for the fire on account of there ain't hardly any wood out there on the steppes, coming closer, trying to figure out what in the hell was out there with their horses screaming like six operas. Close enough to see me fall over and start frothing at any rate. Probably I'd've died for real if they hadn't dragged me back to the ger but who knows with this sideshow body of mine. Maybe I would've just kept on going and going and going until I felt apart. Now there's a picture. Good thing about being mostly dead was that I didn't fight them none; that came later. But even when I did fight—well after all those weeks of fever and starving it wasn't any kind of big deal for five horse-wrangling women to hold down one weak soldier when he thinks he's got an ounce of fight in him. What they did to bring me back from the brink I couldn't tell you for certain. All I know is what the widow-woman told me and that's how my heart wasn't beating when they got me inside. Next thing I knew was waking up in the worst state of confusion I'd had in seven decades of waking up confused and hurting like somebody'd been dancing Irish on my bones.

That was about the long and the short of things for the next month or so, near as I can figure given I wasn't taking any notes during all that time. I was made of confusions and when I wasn't confused about real things I was seeing things that weren't. I was remembering missions but backwards and topsy-turvy. I was remembering people but not who they were to me. I was remembering Jew things but not that I was one, not exactly, and everything muddled-up on account of the goy years. Just information floating around inside me with no context. I kept having dreams where I was on a beach and I was throwing piles of seaweed into the ocean but every time I turned around the waves would wash up two more piles. I'd wake up from those dreams sweating and panting and mad as a bull but more times than not the women had wrapped sheepskins around me so tight I couldn't move, let alone get up and punch a rock or whatever my deep-fried brain wanted to do about it. Sweat it out horizontal I suppose was their logic. Well fact is then I probably couldn't have stood up anyway.

Maybe you think it sounds like a grand old time to be looked after by five strong women but even if I wasn't queer as a three-dollar bill I'd find that tough to swallow. You ever been so sick you can't lift a bowl to your mouth? Crying and shitting myself and having seizures so bad I cracked whatever it is I got now instead of teeth: there wasn't a single damn thing about it that was nice. Later I guess it was funny, a little. Every time the women cleaned me up they had a good chuckle at my dick on account of circumcision not really being a thing there unless you're Muslim, which is hardly anybody as far out in the grasslands as we were. Made it seem a lot less like all the times I'd gotten strapped in and hosed down in the long before, all them ladies schmoozing and talking about churning butter and the coming spring. Joking and laughing. Felt normal, nearly.

By the time I could get my legs under me foaling season was just getting underway and lambing wasn't far off, so practically the minute I knew my head from my ass I was being dragged out there with them and having things explained to me like I was a real mush-brained kid, which in some ways I was. I can't tell you how many times I offended the land spirits in the first week alone, five women yelling at me when I said the wrong words or used the wrong tool or God help me if I so much as thought about bathing in the river instead of carrying the water away. Normally foreigners are exempt from that kind of thing but I guess they figured they'd shoveled enough mare's milk into me that I was one of the family. I think that first week I gained ten pounds and every one of them I needed. For whole days at a time I didn't think about the things I'd done or the things I was trying to remember and the things I didn't want to and the things I couldn't quite, and the only blood on my hands was from the wrong end of a goat. I got given the jobs nobody else wanted to do, which mostly meant catching all the lambs and kids one by one before dark because it might have been spring but the nights were so cold you could lose your nose if you stuck it outside, and the babies had to sleep in a pen in the second ger. Between us not knowing each other and all the animals losing their minds it was a good while before we exchanged between any of us words that weren't life or death. When they asked me my name one night over dinner, I was so tired I wasn't paying attention and they had to ask me twice, but things like names and dates came and went then and at the time I was so muddled-up I couldn't remember what my momma named me, and without thinking I said: I dunno.

So that's what they called me. Bi medekhgüi baina. Medekhgüi.

The man named I Don't Know.

 

* * *

 

Things like that, and then all the rules and chores and animal things I had to remember every day is why I started the second notebook. The first one I'd stopped keeping up because now that I was around people even looking at it made me feel crawly and ashamed, but since I was remembering things about me on top of having to remember things about other people I needed to make notes so a thing wouldn't fall out of my head if I stopped looking at it. I almost burned the first notebook in the stove and at the last minute decided not to, which I'm damn thankful for even if it still makes me feel something dreadful to look at it. Without it I wouldn't have those first dark days and maybe I wouldn't have Jakarta and the long trek north to look back on and be glad of how far I've come.

Oktyabr's the one who gave me the second notebook, which had been one of her daughter's things a ways back and only the first few pages ever got used for arithmetic. Oktyabr was the widow-woman's name and if you think that's odd for a Mongol woman then you got to remember their country was Soviet for a good long while. Her parents were very political she said. Later I found out she stole a camel when she was twelve and ran away to live with her aunt and her aunt's people out on the steppe. I asked if she was political too and she looked at the star I was at that moment trying to file off my arm and she looked like she was going to say a lot more but in the end she just said: no. And that sort of said everything anyway.

Her daughters were named Suvdaa and Ebegei and Oyuun and Altan Arasen who was the eldest and about the most handsome woman I'd ever seen in the whole of my life. Altan Arasen glowed like the sun and she had about her a natural grace you couldn't have gotten if you'd been sent to finishing school for twenty years, every movement of her hands and her hips like a dance she was doing with herself or the horses or the very earth. She was also a great big flirt and after a while I worried about her mother getting the wrong idea or maybe multiple wrong ideas about what was going on, so one time when Octyabr was trying to teach the village idiot how to get on a horse without falling off the other side I tried to explain how I was a queer. Well that went over like a lead balloon. First off I didn't know any words for queer in Mongolian so I was resorting to charades over the back of a pony because I didn't want to say I fuck men to the nice lady who'd spent the better part of a month wiping my ass. I guess I got the idea across because then Oktyabr says is that how come you got such a funny-looking dick? And I tried to say no that's on account of I'm a Jew, but I didn't know the word for Jew either. Funny enough HYDRA didn't think being able to say either of those things was going to be useful in my line of work. Oh, she says finally, yevreyi: I thought they were all gone.

Well there wasn't much of anything that could talk me down after that. See I fell knowing bad things were happening in Europe; I knew about the pogroms and the ghettos crowding up something awful and we even knew a little about the trains and the camps, but I didn't know how bad it got and Oktyabr didn't know it wasn't that bad and so we were both of us having a meltdown in each other's general direction when Altan Arasen, who'd been to school in Ulaanbaatar, swanned over and set us both straight. But me I wasn't so good at calming down in the early days, so I took off running past the sheep, past the goats, through all the horses and freaking them out like a real stupid asshole, and then I ran some more under that big open sky that just never ever ever stops. I ran until sunset and I couldn't breathe and I had to go crawling back to show my belly. I'd skimped out on the night chores and I knew I was in trouble. But Oktyabr shoved a big chunk of aaruul in my mouth and didn't say nothing so I didn't say nothing either, and her daughters were all talking in the way that means you're not saying anything but real pointedly, and nobody ever brought up the Jew thing again, except for when Altan Arasen caught me by the arm the next morning and said: the future's the only thing that's certain, Medekhgüi. It's the past that's changing all the time.

 

* * *

 

All right, look, here's a thing I just don't get, and if I don't get it off my chest now for the zero-point-five seconds I plan on spending here in America then it's going to bug me forever. I'm going back to the Continent tomorrow. God almighty was this the stupidest idea I've had since seeing if I could take my arm off with a screwdriver and a bottle of Manischewitz. I ain't ever coming back here again.

Here's the thing. I'm not so stupid as to think all them pulps we vacuumed up as kids by the dozens were any kind of accurate predictor of what the future was bound to look like. That's why they call it science fiction. If you'd run a survey before pushing a bunch of people into a time machine I doubt most of them would really and truly expect flying cars and cities on the moon. I ain't disappointed. You got 3D printing and particle accelerators the size of towns, and rocket ships and internet and you can treat aneurysms by freezing people and bringing them back to life again. Of all the futures we could've had you all went and made a pretty good one. But what every one of us expected back then was that the future'd be a lot more beautiful than this. Buildings uglier than we were raising in New York when we thought the world was ending. Robert Moses's ghost creaming himself over tract housing. And Lord have mercy your dishwater cars. Did no one with any imagination survive the goddamn War?

If they could fix it somehow, if they could make it so I didn't fall and I got through to V-E Day, which I know is a big fucking ask but bear with me: I know what I'd tell my grandkids, or my sister's grandkids, or whoever I could make stay still long enough to hear me out. You're going to do amazing things is what I would say. You're going to save lives. You're going to put men on the moon. You're going to fix the world a little more every day.

But don't you forget about the beauty.

 

* * *

 

One thing Oktyabr had that I loved from the get-go was this absolutely ancient cathedral radio. I have no idea how she got her hands on it or how she kept it nice when it spent a good portion of the year strapped to the side of a camel, but it was a goddamn beauty and probably older than me. That's a lie. I had to look that up just now because I'd got the idea somehow that when I was born we'd had what we called then a gothic radio, but the internet says the one we had was first made in 1930 when I would've been thirteen or thereabouts. Funny how memory can play tricks on you like that. Feels kind of like a relief when it happens because I know now that it happens to everybody else. People convinced they grew up in the pink house on X Street when really they grew up in the peach house on Y Street. Normal.

Anyway that's the mistake I made with Oktyabr's cathedral radio the first time I clapped eyes on it. I put my hands on either side of it like I was aiming to kiss it and I said I haven't seen one of those since I was a baby. We had one just like this I said. And then I turned it on and got somebody talking about agricultural performance in Ömnögovi Aimag. It threw me for a loop because for some harebrained reason I wasn't expecting it. Some old part of me was expecting Al Jolson to come crackling out of those speakers all the way out there in a ger in Mongolia.

I must've looked like I'd been slapped because Oktyabr said how old are you? I dunno I said, what's the year? And she said 2015. Two thousand and fifteen she said. That's how Mongolians say it, in full like that and not twenty-fifteen like Americans, except of course they say it in Mongolian. I'm translating. Two thousand and fifteen she said. I said: what? And she said: what? And because that was a good day I said I'm ninety-eight years old. And we stared at each other.

Well Oktyabr didn't laugh and she didn't call me crazy, but after I could tell she thought of me a little different. Whether it was because she really did think I was crazy or because she believed me I'll never know, because like a lot of other things we didn't talk about it again. But often I saw her looking at me without trying to hide that she was looking, and she wouldn't look away when I looked back either. I just know around her afterwards sometimes I felt really old and sometimes I felt really young. Mostly young. Mostly I felt like a baby trapped in a twisted mangy fucked-up body I wished I could peel away from my bones. Rub it off like a snake in the sand and start over. Oh God help me but I wish it was so. I've been alive for so long but I've done so little living. That scares the pure pounded shit out of me and I don't mind admitting it. What if all I get is my threescore and ten? Thirty years gone to the wolves already and nothing to show for it but those potter's fields. Oh Lord I'm so scared. I'm so scared of dying. Oh God I'm

 

* * *

 

I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.

I'll be fine once I get the fuck out of this fucking country.

 

* * *

 

London shouldn't be as comfortable for me as it is. First time I saw London it was bombed to shit and all the Jews jumpy as rabbits about whether windows were going to start getting smashed here too, and the next time I saw London I was killing somebody in it. But after New York it's like a big gasp of fresh air when you've been stuck in a bar all night with seventeen men all smoking Pall Malls. I miss it already. New York. That's a stupid thing to say when I've just run away from it about as fast as I could get myself on a ship but it's God's honest truth. You can miss places that are no good for you. Same sort of way I miss Jakarta, or the way I miss the thing I wish it could be for me. Some places hook you like a fish and don't ever let go. You wish you could go there again for the first time and you can't. But something about London is different. It never feels the same.

In Mongolia the birthing season was over and while I hadn't gotten all that much better at riding horseback at least I was falling off less, and I'd even managed to catch a couple of horses with Oktyabr's lasso-pole, although I did it from the ground like some kind of cretin. Summer hit its peak and then seemed to disappear. Summer in Mongolia is fast as a blink and I guess in some places it gets real hot but out there where we were it didn't at all. I was thanking my lucky stars that Oktyabr's husband had been a real big guy because when autumn lifted its head I was piling on his old clothes like I wasn't ever going to feel warm again, especially at night when even sleeping in the livestock ger with all them sweaty animals didn't seem to help any. The first morning we woke up to frost on the ground Oktyabr got this look on her face like she was ready to square up with whatever she had instead of gods, and she looked at her daughters and her daughters all called up the self-same look and to be perfectly honest with you I was too scared to ask. But Altan Arasen told me later how tonight we were going to celebrate because tomorrow we were going to pack up the ail, the encampment, and travel to the wintering place where the rest of their family was. I said: celebrate? And real slow she said yes Medekhgüi it's where you have fun, and she was teasing but I was trying to remember the last time I'd done anything anybody'd consider any fun at all. The whole day I was as terrified of that celebration as I was of the huge dun mare who'd decided it was her life's mission to separate me from my head.

Fact was that while I was maybe holding it together enough to sit on a calm pony and collect manure and milk goats, and maybe I was remembering a lot more and a lot more coherently than I had been, I wasn't what you'd call stable. On top of being patient with me when I forgot who I was or who they were the women still had to be real careful about coming up on my left side and making sudden noises and saying things that sounded like orders, or I'd go blank and do a task over and over until I'd worn all the skin off my hands practically down to the bone. But more than that I was a lot of work. They pretended like it was nothing, but I could see how tired it made them when they had to deal with me on top of all the regular stuff you have to do when you're a herder at the edge of civilization. Screaming at night and getting sick when the wind changing brought a smell I didn't recognize; Lord have mercy but I was a trial. What I was most scared of was something happening that night and me ruining their celebration. I'll just stay in the other ger is what I said to Altan Arasen. I'm going to go to sleep is what I said to Oktyabr. What I meant was: I'm going to cover myself in sheepskins and stuff a scarf in my mouth so if I cry out in the night you don't hear it. I'm going to be good. But all five of them grabbed a part of me and hauled me into their ger and that sufficed as an argument.

There was a time in late ‘42 when I got invited to a cousin's wedding where they went all the way and brought out the chuppah and the glass to be smashed and the whole deal, like we didn't do so often those rationed days, singing and dancing and the bride up on a chair looking like nobody'd ever been happier in the whole history of people being married. I remember the wedding stuff but also I remember two stooped old men standing in the corner in their black hats not dancing, and they weren't wearing their shawls like most of the other men were, both of them standing there with tears rolling wet down their beautiful craggy faces. When I looked back later they were gone. I remember this feeling going through me hot and cold, how on the one hand I was having such a good time and I was so happy for the bride and the groom and for everybody there singing and laughing and celebrating somebody's good fortune, and how on the other hand I couldn't shake the melancholy of seeing those two men alone, looking almost naked without their shawls even though most men I knew didn't wear them except during High Holy Days, and the whole rest of the night I'd held that feeling in me like cupping a candle between my hands so it didn't go out. I tried to explain it to Becks later and she just gave me one of her looks like I was crazy. Oh Jaime she said, sometimes I don't understand you at all.

That's the feeling I had that night in the ger and that's what I imagined Becks saying to me if she'd been there. Oh Jaime. Can't you just have fun? Because I did have fun, I really did. Oktyabr pulled down the big bladder of airag to pass around while all them ladies were telling dirty jokes, and then she brought down her morin khuur—fermented mare's milk and the horsehead fiddle, I mean, the fiddle being an especially special thing. There's a myth about how the first one was made from the bones and skin of an enchanted horse and ever since then they've been holy objects. When an instrument maker makes a morin khuur, first he finds the right tree to chop down and after he chops it down he thanks the earth for the gift of it, and then he makes all the parts of the fiddle with its bridge like a camel and its pegs like roof poles and the head carved like the head of a horse, and when he's done that he goes out and he finds the swiftest and most beautiful pony he can and he takes hundreds of perfect hairs from its tail for the two strings and the bow. And when he's putting all the pieces together he's still not done, because what he has to do then is baptize it. See the horse has to come into the fiddle or it won't sing. It'll just be a bunch of wood. It won't be alive. And the way he does that is by playing one long crawling scrape of a note up and down the whole body of the fiddle like a scream, and that's the sound of a horse calling out wild in the belly of the world.

That's the instrument that makes a ger a ger, whether or not it ever gets played, and that's what Oktyabr took down from the wall that night and brought over to me and put in my hands. Just touching it with my dirty fingers made me want to shrivel up and die. My metal hand on that sacred thing. Play something is what Oktyabr said. All her daughters watching me with their big dark eyes. I can't I said. Then just play a note Oktyabr said. I can't I said, I can't. So Oktyabr took it from me and she said: and I guess you can't sing either. I can't I said very small. That was a lie and I bet you anything she knew it from the look she gave me then.

She sat down opposite me in the smoky ger with all her daughters around us and said: then I expect you, she said, to dance.

And she started playing.

If you haven't heard a morin khuur then I'm telling you don't look it up. Since then I've listened to I don't know how many recordings and I'm telling you don't. It's nothing at all like the sound of it coming at you from four feet away inside of a yurt with the dark outside battering at the door. The sound a morin khuur makes is the sound of horses running and eagles hunting and all the rivers of the plains flowing clean and bright for a thousand thousand years. It tells you how flat the steppe is and how wide the sky and it tells you in a way that's older than your bones, older than language, older than man and the crawling things that came before us. And when her daughters started to sing it was like there were five morin khuurs in the room because the sound that came out of their throats was the sound of the fiddle, a drone like the earth was a string and God was drawing one long crawling scrape of a note through all of creation.

My momma believed in magic and so by extension so did we. Maybe that sounds strange to you, but Jews have always believed in magic. I mean just look at us with our moon calendar and our thing for numbers and our rituals so old some of them we don't know why we do them, our rabbis who used to talk to animals and raise the dead and turn staffs into snakes: we're pagan stock no doubt about it. But for me and Becks it'd been hard to feel any kind of connection to that earthy stuff in Brooklyn where trees were a thing you found in parks and animals were mostly worked or strays, where maybe the closest you ever got to Mother Nature was being stung by a bee. I felt it a little in the War but mostly what I was feeling then was dead and afraid, and I was starting to figure that most of me was still back there and that nothing was ever going to make me feel alive again, not until the sound of that fiddle and the women singing in the dark.

So when I tell you I had no choice about getting to my feet I mean that. Magic in that ger that night and God in it too. Oktyabr watching me with her bow leaping wild over the strings. I danced then like I danced at that wedding and like I danced the night before they shipped me to Europe and like I danced in queer bars and regular bars and bars with no names at all, like I danced in the city on the streets with the beat in my thin young bones before the War. Picking my feet up to that old old sound. I danced like I never had before and I doubt I ever will again, crying like I might've at the marriage I'd never have and the funeral I never got and the birth when I didn't at all. And when I thought I couldn't dance no more those women stood up and grabbed hold of me and moved me and shouted in my ear as Oktyabr played and played and played. Horses running out there in the black. I danced until my legs shook and my pulse roared in my ears and in my eyes and I kept dancing even after I couldn't see. Asleep on my feet and still dancing in my dreams. God almighty.

I didn't die but what a way it would have been to go.

 

 

I woke up I couldn't tell you how long after, but it was before dawn and Oktyabr was with me. Sleeping in the livestock ger I mean. After I passed out or whatever it was that I'd done I guess they'd figured I needed somebody around to make sure I was still breathing, and that somebody was her. So it was me and her and three sick sheep and a foal who got born real late all breathing together in that little warm space, but I'd never felt so lonely in my God damn life as I did right then. My thoughts muddled up and sticky and feeling like half of each one was stuck in a different language. But then I thought clear as a bell: I got to get out of here. By here I didn't mean the ger. I meant Mongolia. Which was stupid as hell and I don't mind admitting it. I can't think of anywhere in the whole world where I was safer than out there in the ass-end of absolutely nowhere, nobody speaking English for five hundred miles and where the only people recognizing my arm were recognizing how useful it was for jamming in a horse's mouth and yanking out a rotten tooth.

But I was laying there thinking all of a sudden how much I missed people, missed talking to them; brushing past them in the street, in the cities, the crush of the trains and the racketeers shouting and how sometimes the best way to be completely alone is to be part of a crowd. I guess given what happened in Jakarta you could say that was progress. I was born in a city and the city was in my bones and I was homing in a way, even if it wasn't New York I was thinking of at the time. In fact I was thinking of Paris. Paris as I remembered it during the War, when she wasn't at her best but when she was still the most beautiful dame on the Continent. What I was thinking was that I would dearly love to clean myself up and go to Paris and walk in the evening though the arrondissements and eat something that wasn't milk or meat. Mostly I was lying to myself on account of how bad I felt about Oktyabr and her daughters having to look after me, and I sort of knew I wasn't going to do any of those things I was dreaming of, but the wanting was real too. And I knew in my gut if I followed them to the wintering place then I'd never go back to a city again.

I didn't have much I could call my own then but I took as little as I could. I took the clothes I was wearing and the boots that they'd given me and two bottles of water and a big piece of aaruul that was going funny and my best knife and my two notebooks and a sheepskin to wrap it all up in. I left my guns hoping they could sell them and make back what they lost on me. And then just as I was pussyfooting my way out the door I turned for one last look at Oktyabr and damned if she wasn't laying there looking right at me. Probably she'd been watching me the whole time. Scared me so bad I nearly joined the choir invisible right then and there. But she didn't say nothing and she didn't say nothing and after about two years of that I turned to go and then just. Fucking. Couldn't. So I turned back and said: Oktyabr. And she said: what. Thank you I said, for everything. Are you going to say goodbye she said. Well I opened my mouth but nothing came out. If she'd been the Angel of Death she'd've got me. So that's a no, she said. Finally I said: goodbye Oktyabr.

You'll be back, said Oktyabr, smug as shit, and rolled over.

 

* * *

 

It was a German who said no battle plan survives contact with the enemy and thank God he wasn't a Nazi or it'd burn to say he was right. At any rate my plan was stupid and it's a good thing it didn't work out. See I was aiming to just take off west and see where I ended up in a couple of weeks and from there maybe make my way to Paris, but the holes in that plan you could probably see from space and me not really being the brains of the operation made everything that much worse. What happened in the end was I strode off like a conquering hero and about five hundred yards from the ail I stopped like I'd hit a wall, and I could feel myself starting to get tore up as I realized how maybe this wasn't the smartest idea I ever had and maybe I should go back, and that was the same moment when I turned and walked smack into Stinky Horse.

Stinky Horse wasn't his name. What I mean by that is horses don't really have names out there on account of it just not being practical. If you had a hundred cats you wouldn't name any of them either. But sometimes you got to convey to somebody hey over there it's that one, and sometimes you use all the words they got for horse colors and sometimes you use No Tail and sometimes you use One Sock and then you get things like Stinky Horse, who was ancient and fat and gray and had hooves like dinner plates and was about the only pony within shouting distance of the ger who I could reliably sit on without falling off. Well I must've been in a state and a half not to hear him thumping up behind me and now that he was there I had no earthly idea what I was supposed to do about it. In the dark I could just see where the rest of the herd was, far off on the other side of the ail in a big clump, and him all the way over here with me: I couldn't wrap my brain around it for whole minutes. What I thought to myself after that was oh God. What I said aloud was no. And what I did was turn around and walk off in the other direction.

I guess you know what happened then. I took off and Stinky Horse followed me and that was the way of things for the next hour while I tried to convince myself he was going to get bored and go home. Problem is, home for a Mongol horse is anywhere. If I'd ridden him to Jakarta he probably could've found his way back in half the time it'd taken me to stumble my way through China. So finally I grabbed him by the ear and hauled his head over and said: are we really doing this I mean for fucksakes look at us. Me in three layers of cast-offs and a deel that was coming apart under the arms and a beard Moses'd be proud of and Stinky Horse and his everything. We really doing this is what I said. Well being a horse he didn't answer but that was kind of an answer in itself. I let go of his ear and said fine. He looked at me like: is there a problem here officer? And I said I don't know what you're complaining about you got what you wanted. Why the long face?

He was laughing inside. I could tell.

 

* * *

 

Talking to the horse was a habit I couldn't break. You try walking across a whole country and see whether you don't talk to anything around you. I'd've talked to rocks if it hadn't been for him. Half the time plodding along pretending he wasn't following me and half the time running ahead of me while I tried to catch up. A few days out I switched from Mongolian to Yiddish just to see if it would make any difference at all, and wouldn't you know it he thought that was real funny. Sidling up to me and flirting and chewing on me when I yelled at him. Come on I said. Come on meshugganer. Not knowing exactly which of us I was talking to. Both of us crazy old men out there on the plains. Say what you like about everything else, but when I got footsore and climbed up on him in a fit of self preservation, the crafty son of a bitch dropped the asshole act and jogged slow and careful like I was a six-month baby hanging on for dear life. Made me suspicious for a stretch until I figured out his game. One time I tried to make him go left by leaning and then shoving his neck and then even trying to use my knees and thinking at him like a proper herder, but he just went on in the other direction like I hadn't done anything at all. Later we crested a hill and I saw a huge ail down there right where we would've come out if he'd listened to me. After that I mostly let him take the wheel and didn't once have cause to regret it. Don't know how he knew, but he knew. One smart meshugganer.

Later I looked it up and it turned out the two of us walked nearly one thousand four hundred miles together. Twenty-two days is what I knew then. I drank when he drank and didn't when he didn't even though I probably could've survived whatever made his nose turn up. Chewing on bitter grasses to stay awake and catching fish in the rivers. Mice with my bare hands at dawn when they were heading sleepy back to their nests. My ribs closer to my skin by the time we were done and my dreams full of food but I didn't starve neither, and that shaggy horse keeping me warm at night. Growing up I had the idea that horses always slept on their feet but the old man slept on his side like a lump. More times than not I woke up with him wrapped around me like we were old marrieds. He only kicked me the once, but you would've kicked too if the guy you were spooning had a nightmare and yelled bloody murder right in your ear. He shrieked like mares do when they get bit and not quite awake I yelled back and then both of us went and shouted at each other for a while until we sorted ourselves out. God knows what anybody within ten miles of us thought was going down. Well next time it happened he just grunted and tried to roll over onto me and that wasn't so bad. God knows I've woken up to uglier things on top of me than him.

I knew we weren't hitching our wagons to the same star, but all the same it hit me hard when we came up on the border provinces and Stinky Horse saw the mountains and stopped dead. The sun was setting behind those peaks and streaking the plains with gold. The sky that time of year doesn't go red with the evening, but instead the horizon fills up coral and pink with the purple dark above it coming in like God drawing a blanket over the world. Bright as a Matisse and that sky bigger than you'd think anything could be. I could've died then happy and stupid and my ghost would've kept standing there and watching it and waiting for the next one. Maybe I might've done if Stinky Horse hadn't picked that moment to turn around and start walking back the way we'd come.

Hey fuck you is what I said and thinking inside: no don't leave me out here, and also thinking: that's what happens when you love a thing, you schmuck. It leaves. Fine I said. Fine! Gai avek! Gai tren zich! Nem zich a vaneh! And he flicked his ears back and kept walking like he knew what I was saying and how I didn't mean it at all. I stood there with my hands in fists like a little boy until I couldn't see that horse no more, which was a long damn time. Night by then and all the stars in the heavens so bright I could've read a newspaper by them. I had this sick ashamed feeling like he was going to go back to Octyabr and tell her how useless I'd been and how crazy and how scared, and tell her all the secrets I told him about what I'd done and what I wanted to do and who I missed and why, and right then all the nice things I'd been dreaming of felt awful far away. Vast and impossible the rest of that journey. Vast and dark the night. Nothingness closing its fists on me. If I'd been able to turn around or take one single step maybe it would've been fine, but I stood there like a scarecrow and didn't move and didn't move until not moving hurt like a beating and a half and I couldn't hardly breathe.

I opened my mouth and what came out was a scream.

It came up from my toes and sent me to my knees. A small sound becoming a huge one becoming a thing I couldn't stop until I thought my heart was maybe going to stop instead. It went on and on and on and on. Seventy years of anger scraping out of me at once. Pulling out a knife but the knife went on forever and the knife wasn't real and the knife was my heart and the knife was me, screaming at the hugeness of the sky like an animal in a trap or like a deathly wounded thing. And like a wounded thing it made no difference. I knew it even as I came to the end of all my breath and gasped in another and I did it again. They must've heard me in Moscow. They must've heard me in Paris. I hope the freak heard me in his God damn grave.

When I got my words lined up inside me what I asked was why. See during the fever I wanted to throw a punch and I wanted be noticed and I wanted at least a little to die, but I wasn't looking for answers like I was then. Shaking on my knees and biting at the sky. Why was what I wanted and what I got was silence so I kept filling it up. Why was I born and why did it happen and why was I made for this why did I suffer so hard and so long and for pity's sake why was I still. Silence my answer and I thought then of the people who'd suffered before me and how God answered them, Noah and Job and Elijah and Joseph and all the rest God spoke to when they asked why why why. What was wrong with me that they got answers and I didn't I wondered. What was wrong with me that I needed answers at all. All those questions.

~~Well at dawn what happened was~~

all those questions I still got damn You why did You abandon me why did You leave me why did you leave me in that hole in that pit why did You leave me on that table in that coffin why did You leave me with them all those years and decades while ~~he~~ while everyone slept

where were You when I chewed off my own arm and when they dragged me through the snow and when they gave me back to him where were You when they sold me down the river and made me do all those things take all those things where were you when they put lightning through my brain and I was pissing myself on that slab begging them to let me die where were you when I cried for you begged for you to think of me find me take me out of that place stevie darling please stevie please didn't you come and find me stevie WHY DIDNT YOU COME FOR

shit

shit

shit shit shit shit

 

* * *

 

I nearly went and burned this notebook just now. I mean it. I'm sitting there with the lighter fluid and the matches and I'm thinking: do it. And then I'm thinking: no, you stupid sorry son of a bitch, can you even pretend it ain't him you been writing to all this time? So I didn't. That's the long and the short of it. You don't need to hear the rest.

I did burn the third notebook. That being the one I started in Athens. I'd seen a thing on the news and I got so angry I couldn't see straight and I spent two weeks on a hotel bed not hardly eating or drinking and I don't recall if I bathed, just me and a stolen laptop and that notebook writing out coordinates and all the names I could remember of all the men who hurt me and all the men who made me shoot their bullets. Two weeks I festered there, coming up with all kinds of fever dreams about how I was going to crash into their lives and tear out their throats with my teeth and make them beg and cry and writhe just like I did. Damn near getting off on the things I thought then. But when I went out to find a gun, I just couldn't do it. Couldn't hardly even walk out the door. I thought about putting my hands on a rifle and I was nearly sick on the pavement just thinking about it, and then I was sick when I thought in the cold light of day what I'd been thinking in that hotel room with the blinds drawn tight. The rabbis say it's okay to be angry when you see something awful being done or when something awful happens to you, on account of all the times the patriarchs blew their lids, and it's especially okay to think of ways to make things better, but you got to stop before you start thinking about revenge. Rabbi Lev back home used to be fond of saying that a grudge corrodes the spirit. Well I felt then like I'd taken a bath in acid so he for sure was right. I went back to the room and I stood in the shower until the water went cold, and then I went out and told the girl at the fancy coffee shop to surprise me, and I burned that notebook in the parking lot while I drank twenty ounces of about the worst fucking thing I've ever willingly put in my mouth. And then I went back in and ordered another.

The next day is when I started the fourth notebook and that one was for nice things. I guess you could say it was my punishment for thinking all them vengeful thoughts. Every day for a while I made myself write down if I saw folks being kind to each other or something pretty or something that made me smile, or at least made me think of smiling even if my face wouldn't cooperate. I didn't keep that up for too long I'll admit, but it's still awful nice to pick up that notebook and page through it on the grim days and remember those things. Things in it like: a big draft horse playing in a field. A teenager running after a lady to return a bill she'd dropped. An old man with a smile so beautiful I nearly went blind. A bunch of hard-looking boys with tattoos on their faces helping a little kid who'd skinned up her knees. Two cats grooming each other in a bay window. A man giving free haircuts to homeless folks. A bookseller who pulled me inside and made me a cup of tea when I'd been waiting out the rain under her awning. Girls bicycling side by side down the middle of a road. That's all I wrote down about them, but them especially I remember clear as anything. Red-haired in different shades, one of them barefoot and one of them in sandals and both of them wearing modest sundresses and backpacks full of flowers, daffodils and tulips bouncing with the ruts in the road and shedding pollen on their heads in a big yellow halo. I watched them pass and they waved at me and laughed when I stumbled on nothing. Probably they thought I was looking at their legs moving under their skirts but I was just so worried I'd forget them. Now I don't have to worry, because I wrote that down.

 

 

* * *

 

I guess you're wondering now if I ever got to Paris.

I did. In actual fact I did. But I got there and turned around and left within maybe an hour because it wasn't Paris as I imagined it but Paris of old, Paris as she was in the movies, Paris as she was during the War, Paris as she was when I was lost, all those Parises jumbled together on top of a Paris I hardly recognized at all except for the dead-lily smell of it so I guess you could say I never did get to Paris in the end. I wish during the War we'd made some promise about meeting in Paris when the fighting was over. That'd make a good story, wouldn't it? Romantic. We could say we went to Paris via everywhere else in the world and when we met we could say: you're late, and we could say: it only took us seventy years, and then we could laugh. That'd be nice. Maybe someone else got to have that story. I'd like to believe that's true.


	2. Chapter 2

There's a joke that goes like this. There's two rabbis, real good friends. One night they decide they're going to stay up until they've figured out whether or not God exists and boy do they pull out all the stops; the Tanakh and the Talmud and the commentaries and everything all the great rebbes ever wrote or thought or sniffed at spread out over a whole room. And wouldn't you know it, by dawn they've worked it all out. For real and for sure there's no God at all. The one rabbi's pleased by the hard work they've done and he's ready to rest on his laurels so he's awful startled to see his friend get up and start getting ready for shul. But I thought we agreed there is no God! he says. And his friend says: what does that have to do with anything?

That's about how I felt that morning in Mongolia when the sun came up and found me all screamed out in the long grass. God hadn't answered but in a way it didn't matter, because like with the horse that was kind of the answer in itself. There's ways in which God's irrelevant. I was the guy who had to decide if I was going to keep laying there until I died for real or get up and keep walking and so I got up and kept walking. When me and Becks used to complain Ma was fond of saying that you're dead or you're not, and since you're not, there's no use making a fuss about how things could be better if there's nothing we can do to make them so. She also used to say that it wasn't for us to understand the tranquility of bad people or the suffering of good ones, which I think was a quote from something on account of her not usually using words like tranquility, but I never asked her from what. I guess I can look that up now but I kind of want to keep pretending it was all her. At any rate, that's what I thought that morning when I woke up in the grass all full of sorrow: it's not for us to understand. And I got up and walked.

And walked.

And walked.

Thing about traveling the way I did is that you lose yourself. Alone and scared you become one foot in front of the other for miles and miles and then you become nothing but hands and mouth when you stop. You can't be in it as a person or you'll make yourself crazy thinking too hard about things that don't matter. Any sniper knows how to become just a thing that breathes and watches while everything else passes through them like their bones are hollow and whistling in the breeze, going to the place inside you that isn't a place at all. So maybe you're asking where I went and what was I thinking then as I walked and walked and walked. I don't know. All I got is dates. Seventy-one days of walking that could've been cut by ten if I hadn't been so fixated on covering a trail probably nobody could follow anyway, and detours for food I didn't have any kind of say in. Surviving in the wilderness isn't so much about listening to your body as it's a matter of getting out of its way. You fall back and you let it take over. You got an urge to lick that rock? Then by God you lick that fucking rock. Dignity's got nothing to do with it.

I must've gone west for a while and then veered just about dead south because where I ended up was Karachi, and even accounting for me wandering back and forth over just about every square foot of land in Asia that's a long ways off from a Paris trajectory. I remember being scared of something but not when or where or exactly what. More scared than usual I mean. Maybe I heard a language someone hurt me in or maybe I saw someone who looked like somebody else, or maybe my brain just went: south, south is the answer. Well of all the places I could've wound up Karachi wasn't bad at all. I should've been happy I didn't wake up back in Jakarta and starting all over again but this time with more fear. More to lose in Karachi than I did in Jakarta and I don't mean material things. What mostly happened in Karachi is that I woke up a little because I guess it felt so much to me like New York, and then I hit the water and didn't have anywhere else to go. Where I really woke up was in the hold of the ship. I didn't even know where I was going until I got there. And oh Lord the fear in me then, because I couldn't drop back into myself. Maybe I'd been under too long or maybe I was just tired but I couldn't do it. So there I am standing on a port in Dubai thinking: now what.

It turned out for the best because Arabia was good for me. I liked Arabia. I'm sure all those other countries I ghosted through were great places too, but in Arabia I was awake and I stayed awake for an awful long time circling around just not wanting to leave it. In Arabia they don't think it's funny if a man wants to cover himself head to toe and avoid the bustle and not see another person for weeks at a time. Only problem was when I got there I had nothing in the world but the clothes on my back and unlike hotwiring a car or sneaking onto a ship, stealing a camel doesn't really work. See the good ones are trained so they'll walk just fine if you get on them and hup, but you can kick them until you're both bloody and they won't run unless you got the code word. Sort of like me. So my options boiled down to stealing a shitty camel or stealing enough money to buy a good camel because thanks all the same but I wanted to live, and walking across some parts of that desert's a good way to die. I wound up stealing the money and no I'm not proud. Broke into one of those fancy getaway hotels when all the tourists were out on safari or whatever the fuck they call it when you pay somebody to lead you around Exotic Locales on a leash. Sweating grapes the whole time but I could've done it singing Goodbye Dolly Gray and I don't think a soul would've noticed. Lord have mercy the things I found in them suitcases; if I'd wanted to start a blackmail ring that would've been the finest of times to do it. I guess in a way those folks were lucky I was only after their spare change. After that I went and bought a camel who hated the world in a way that was honest to God aspirational and her and I got along just fine.

Out in the desert you'd think there'd be all mouldery Arab stuff or you'd think there'd be nothing at all but in fact you can't throw a rock without hitting a Roman ruin. I stayed in a bunch of them because except near the big tourist towns and the wells there's nobody coming around to admire them. That's a damn shame really because they're fine old things. One in particular's a place I'd go back to if I had the chance. Most of Arabia's heavy and still, and that's good because the dust storms can kill, but around that ruin there was a sweet sweet breeze that came off the far-away water and straight over the sands with nothing in its way, and every evening it'd blow a little cooler and you could almost convince yourself you could smell the salt and the nets and the vinegary sea. The story goes that a Roman guy built it for the love of his life, who I guess was a princess in the way these stories usually go, and instead of mixing the clay with water like it's done by sane people this guy did it with precious oils so every room would smell of different flowers. Well I don't know how true the story is but it's true that there's a room there where the walls smell like something musky and another where they smell like lilac and another where they smell like rose and that's where I slept. My momma's mother used to pat her face with rosewater before bed and until she died she always smelled of it a little at the roots of her hair, and so did my momma and her sisters in due time, and of course when Becks was old enough she wanted to do it too. Roses all the women in my life. I slept better there than I did when I was next door to dying in Mongolia.

 

 

What happened when I finally decided to leave Arabia was that I ran into a country I wasn't expecting to be there.

When I was coming up we didn't much talk about Eretz Yisroel. Or I guess I should say we talked about it but we talked about it as an idea, because when I fell it was a long ways off from being a state. Maybe it was different if you were Hasid or radical but somebody mentioning Zionism in our shul was more likely than not going to suffer a lot of shouting from the old men, and what they always said was Moshiach will come when Moshiach comes. Anything else was apostasy they said. Politics! Goyishkeit! What they wanted was a land full of Torah and a secular Jewish state was not what they dreamed of at Pesach when they said l'shana haba'ah b'Yerushalayim. To Becks and me Jerusalem was a fairy-tale place, and even seeing it on a map didn't make it feel altogether real, not the way the old men talked about it in circles and the Arthurian kind of stories they told about other old men going there to die. Sometimes they'd complain about the Peace Conference and the Balfour Declaration like it was yesterday and like they'd been there, which some of them had been, and that made things even more confusing. Me and Becks couldn't make hide nor hair of it even when the War made it spread from the shuls, people on the street talking about what we'd heard come out of Treblinka before the newspapers got muzzled, and how maybe this wouldn't be such a bad time to make a Jewish homeland in Palestine or Uganda or New Guinea or wherever. But we were Americans we thought. Why did we need a new place when we had America? Becks and me figured folks were only talking about it on account of they wanted to get rid of us. People like Father Coughlin on the radio flapping their gums: if those were the sort of folks wanting a Jewish homeland then no sir we did not need it. It'll never happen we said.

And there I was standing outside the gates of it.

When I talked to folks in Aqaba I got a lot of strong opinions and I got a lot of mixed opinions and I got a lot of conflicting opinions and mostly what I got was even more confused. Hebrew is the language they speak in Israel, is what I was told, and to tell you the truth that shocked me more than Israel being there at all. We spoke Yiddish at home like everyone back when, but we got taught in English and Hebrew at yeshiva and the Hasid kids didn't like that at all. Hebrew to them was straight off the lips of God and using it for anything but Torah was the worst kind of bad behavior, and they made no secret of how they thought we were desecrators and our teachers frauds. I tried to imagine a whole country full of Jews buying fruit and hailing taxis in the Holy Tongue without taking the mick out of each other and damn well could not. Three days I stayed in Aqaba climbing tall buildings so I could look at the border crossing over the hills. Three days I wandered the earthworks at Ayla. Three days I hemmed and hawed. Still napping through the day by habit like I'd done in the desert and waking every time the muezzins called. The old women in the souk shouted to me in the evenings when I wandered through bleary-eyed, brandishing paper twists of loqma and kunafeh at me and laughing when I tried to sweet-talk them. Go home yahud they said. Go to sleep. I don't know where that is I said. Do you have children they said. No I said, no. Very kindly they said: go home.

In the end I went up through Jordan, walking the border and keeping my eyes on that fresh new country like a man watching a bear. I say new but it isn't new at all to the rest of the world is it. To everyone but you and me it's old news, sunshine. I guess they must've told you all about it. Did they sit you down in a classroom when they thawed you out? Did they tell you we cured polio? Did they tell you about that queer cancer? Did they tell you that you can marry whoever you want? How long till you found out we'd been into space? How long till you found out we dropped the bomb? Did they tell you about all the words you can't say and the countries that aren't there no more and the new ones that ate them up? Did you think of me when they did? I thought of you for no reason at all as I was riding that border; you never did have an opinion on Eretz Yisroel that I can recall. But I thought how you might've argued with the old men if you had, barging in and trying to figure out what the right thing was so you could go make it happen and damn the torpedoes. You would've made a good Jew, sweetheart. I don't know if that's a compliment exactly. But it's a fact.

 

* * *

 

Speak of the devil et cetera. You'll never guess who I saw on the television just now.

I'm in Ivano-Frankivsk if it matters. I suppose it's relevant because of the way the folks in the bar were talking, being closer to ground zero than most. On the television was some kind of anniversary retrospective of whatever the fuck it was went down in Sokovia last year, which I say partially because I missed it while I was getting too friendly with a few dozen mares in Mongolia and partially because when I asked folks in the bar to explain it I got about four different stories. Internet doesn't seem to have a much clearer picture either. You up there talking about it, I guess you'd know better than me. When I heard your voice and looked up the interviewer was asking you if you'd have done anything differently, stupid empty things like that, and you were giving these answers that I hope I was the only one to notice sounded like they were being fed to you from off stage. Your pal Stark looked like he wanted to crawl up his own asshole and die and your pal Romanoff looked like maybe she'd help. I didn't see your pal Wilson but I guess that's because he's out here looking for me, given I saw him about two months ago in Minsk and then three and a half weeks ago in Vilnius and just barely got myself tucked away both times. He's good; I wouldn't have expected a pararescueman to be as good as he is at espionage but he's very good. And a handsome man your friend. Once I was safe I didn't mind watching him at all. I wonder what he would do if I came up to him in the street next time and apologized for trying to kill him and put my hand on his arm. Not that I'm in the market. Only wondering, you understand.

I tried to lay down with a man in Greece and couldn't. Isn't that sad? They took that from me. I used to love it: a body on my back and someone's big hands bruising me up, making it good. I liked it rough and I liked it sweet and I liked the weight of a man in my throat. I tried again in Monaco and I tried in Seville and in Dublin I drugged myself all to hell and asked for it so pretty it would've taken a better man than the one I'd found to turn down an offer like that. I just wanted it so bad. And it was good. I came, even; sobbing wet into linen sheets that smelled like cigarettes and sour milk and wishing I could do it again, wishing it could go on forever, wishing I'd never been born. I took a taxi back to the place I was staying because I couldn't stand on the tram. Spent the next six hours in the bathtub throwing up what seemed like every morsel of food I'd ever eaten in the whole of the hundred years I've been breathing on this earth. Was it worth it? Hell. Don't ask me. That's not a question anybody's equipped to answer.

My point is seeing you on the television roiled up a whole sea of things I thought I'd locked up tight and dropped into the ocean, stuck in that bar with half a ginger ale I couldn't bear to leave and all those men pointing and shouting and laughing and cat-calling and then shouting some more, some folks calling for legal action and some folks calling for hangings and some folks telling everyone else to leave it, they're heroes, ain't heroes allowed to fuck up sometimes, and me feeling like an alien sitting there with my human suit coming loose at the seams. I wondered how come you weren't on your feet bringing them low. I wondered how come you were sitting there so calm with the deadness in your eyes and your limp hanging hands. I wondered why you were there at all. 

Sarah'd be disappointed in both of us, don't you think? Me running and hiding like a scared little boy and you up there in front of everyone keeping all your fire in your throat. Come to think of it there were ways in which your Ma was worse than you. Bless her but she was a firecracker. You with your bullies and your protests, sure, but her with her talks and her strikes and the little leaflets she kept handy right up until the end. Further really; while you were fending off all my aunts after the funeral and I was getting on cleaning out her closet, I tipped over her purse and out fell her lipstick and her checkbook and about a hundred pamphlets, fluttering all around the room when the wind came through the window I'd left open to air out the sick I swore I could still smell. Diving under the dresser and the bed and swatting after them like a cat with two balls of yarn as I heard you and Aunt Ruthie on the stairs. I dumped them all out the window just in time. Kids making paper airplanes out of them for weeks down in the tenement yard. Oh brother but Abbott and Costello had nothing on me.

Well I left that bar just now with my skin crisping off my bones and so mad I couldn't see straight. Am I the only special one, huh? Am I the only thing you'll fight for in this brave new fucking world? At least that's what I thought as I was leaving but when I got back to my room I thought really what you did was not fight for me. You made me fight for me. What made you give up? What killed your fire? What made you stop fighting, tiger? It couldn't have been me dying. I refuse to believe that's true. When your ma died you took up her mantle and turned yourself into a pair of fists and a bloody mouth and you'd've pushed the world off the shoulders of Atlas his own self if it would've helped anybody at all. How come I'm the exception, you hypocritical son of a bitch?

First thing I remembered about you was hating you. What I remember thinking wandering across Mongolia was all the times I'd prayed you'd come and save me, all the times I was in the dark and dreaming about you breaking down my bars with your bare hands and hauling me out into the light, and when finally you figured out where I'd been all this time you made me rescue you. Seventy years of needing a hero and you come to me saying my name like it's a magic spell and I'm Sleeping Beauty just waiting for you to touch my cold dead hand. The nerve of you. Not even going back for my remains so my momma would have something to bury. Not a soul went looking for me you know. I only know because I looked it up. They declassified our mission records in 2000 with all them Nazi War Crimes papers and it's all online now, everything we did, everyone we killed and every bullet we fired and every bomb we set. And me and my KIA. KIA and God damn all of you for not giving me the dignity of even a few months MIA first. Stark and the whole of the SSR under your collective thumb and you couldn't send so much as a couple of shepherd-boys to go have a little wander in that valley. What do you think—would you still love me if I'd done a thing like that to you?

Don't answer that. I know.

I know.

Angry or not I can't leave you behind. There's things in our brains and our bodies from back when we were crouching naked in the long grasses of Africa, old old hitchhikers grabbing us by the scruff of our necks and making us track seagulls in the air like we got any chance of catching one or any desire to put our teeth in it, and that's the way sometimes I imagine you in my head. Clinging to the tender inside bits of me and whispering sweet nonsense. My bad angel. I wish I could say you weren't good for me but then well: I'd be dead. I'm a sucker for you, sweetheart. You ought to know that by now. Could've gone home in one piece and I followed you instead. Sat up in my grave twice at the sound of your voice and God help me I know I'd do it again willing or not. Got it so bad I've been sitting here thinking how we might've got our happy ending, and believe me or don't but I think I went and figured out the moment where it all went wrong.

I was sixteen and working for the paper, manning the presses and doing editorial cartoons under Mr. DeLillo and starting to think maybe I wanted to work in radio instead. See folks had been telling me I had a voice for it, a carrying voice, and I figured if I worked in the back rooms for a while maybe they'd let me get up in front of a microphone eventually and see what I could do. Just my bad luck that right around then the press-radio war started and Mr. Ellis said to me boy you better stay where you're sat because we're putting a muzzle on those damn leeches. Well NBC and CBS, the very last thing they wanted was more folks against radio so they pretended they weren't interested in news at all, no sir, and they went right back to playing Orson Welles and Amos 'n' Andy and letting Mr. Ford walk all over Mr. Roosevelt and all the while waiting for the opportune moment. When their time came I was at Princeton and Ma was a mint but she would've had my head on a platter if I'd left college for the radio life. So I didn't. But maybe there's another me who didn't listen to Mr. Ellis. Maybe there's another me who became a Murrow boy and went to Europe not as a sack of meat but as a man, another me who went as a voice instead of a gun and maybe they didn't strap me down and maybe I lived. Maybe you lived too. Maybe we went home. Or maybe they caught you at that recruiting station and said go home son. Maybe you stayed safe and maybe you never heard of the SSR and maybe I came back to you instead of you coming to me. Hell if this is my fantasy maybe they took you and that coffin cured you but it didn't make you a monster and they let you go. Maybe you met me at the docks. Maybe I surprised you at the door. Maybe I danced you around the room with your letters in my pocket and my heart in my throat and maybe all the brave I hadn't had to be over there caught up with me at once, my hand on your hand your shoulder your face and my knees knocking yours one two three four. Maybe I kissed you with the blinds open. Maybe you didn't tell me to stop.

Easy to imagine that now. Easy to imagine you saying yes when you're not here in front of me with those cold blue eyes looking back. You were an eerie piece of shit sometimes, you know that? Times I caught you looking at me and I couldn't tell what you were thinking at all, whether you were pleased or pissed or daydreaming or undressing me in your mind. God knows I wasn't special; I saw you do it to Becks and Sarah and just about everybody we knew at some point or other. Seemed like sometimes you weren't there or like you'd slipped sideways, like you'd walked out of the room and gone somewhere else and left your body behind and forgot to slap a smile on it before you went. I remember when you sat in the sun all the blue'd wash out like the ice in you melting and you'd be left with just two black pinpricks in your white white face. Fey you were back then and beautiful but when the sun hit you right you weren't from this Earth.

I wonder if anybody ever said the same about me. I guess I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe God knew already what we were going to become.

 

* * *

 

After Jordan I walked some more and then Aleppo is where I started hopping trains. Easy and got me places a whole lot faster than my poor tired feet. By and large I don't get blisters no more and when I do they're gone in hours, but that doesn't mean my bones don't feel the ache of sixteen hours at a march in shoes a hobo wouldn't have taken off my hands. It was trains or hitching and I don't know if I mentioned but at the time I maybe had a very small horror of being memorable. There was one time I was tempted believe you me. Walking outside Duma on the side of the road only because I was planning to cross it when the going was good, when up pulls of all things a lavender town car that could not have been a year younger than me and sitting in it two of the most beautiful men I'd ever seen in my damn life. I assumed they were local until the driver opened his mouth and in a soft Heartland accent said hey man you need a lift? Now me I still looked like I'd just crawled out from under a rock in Mongolia maybe a week ago but I was getting my wits back some, so real polite I said no sir you don't want me in that pretty boat of yours. And the guy in the passenger seat said naw man don't worry about it. We just dropped a guy off in Damascus he said. Well I looked at them and I looked at the car and I looked at the stretch of road I still had to walk and I wanted to say yes, but what I said was: I'm all right thanks. Cool man well your loss said the driver. Take care homie said the passenger. And they drove off in their big purple car.

I got to wondering where they came from and how they got there of course but mostly I got to wonder if they ever figured it out. How close I came to saying yes and how much I wanted to get in the back of that car and how much I wouldn't have minded if they'd parked somewhere quiet and kissed on me a while. How close they'd come to having the DC Killer in their backseat. Couple of American boys like that motoring through an active war zone for God knows what purpose: they'd've heard the news from home even if they hadn't been there. What would they have done if I took off my gloves I wonder. If I'm honest I hope they never know. I hope they go on and live the rest of their lives not knowing.

In Greece I already said I did two stupid things but in Italy I did something even stupider. I went to Azzano. I know I know I know. I know. Being in Italy at all making my skin creep even though Azzano was the furthest north or east we ever got on our own feet. Never said I was clever. Damn fucking fool idea going there thinking oh it's going to be fine it won't be a problem I won't have a God damn breakdown in some poor farmer's field. Well it was, and I did. I suppose I just wanted to see it. Nothing really like I remembered to look at it but the smell was just the same. They say smell's the strongest trigger for memories and I don't disbelieve them. I wasn't there hardly a minute and I was down wheezing hard in the dirt thinking God no God please God I wish I was wearing my pack not that it would be any saving grace at all but because it would feel like something at least and out there we're nothing, nothing, bags of skin and gristle and bone just waiting to be blown to pieces and when you hear the thud you think: the next one's coming for me. Not in this spot but for me specifically me and you try to burrow into the earth and tense every muscle you know and all the ones you learn you have when you think you've come to die, as if those wee red strands can protect you against the shock that's coming down down down to mince you mangle you grind you back into the clay you were shaped from in the quiet dawn of the world. Quiet's a thing you dream of and don't believe in anymore, not with the whining screaming shells and the whining screaming boys and the thud and the crash of a thing that's not really noise at all, the noise of it landing so close it's just force, a violence, a wave knocking your feet out from under you and if you're lucky your ears are the only things that bleed.

Since it wasn't a real thing that knocked me to the ground I got up eventually. I was sick first but I got up. Nobody yelling at me to get my ass in gear so I took my sweet time getting up and cleaning my face and walking. There's a little town there now. I suppose there was always a town but I don't remember seeing anything with the dark and the shells and trying not to die. Come to think of it the buildings looked awful new for the Continent so maybe there's always been a town but really there wasn't by the time we got there, and maybe not for a long while after. What do you call a place if there wasn't anything there for years? Is it still the same town if you rebuild the whole thing? I guess the people coming back would say it's them that make the town and not the buildings but I wonder how many came back. I wonder how many got out. I'm sorry to say I didn't ask while I was there, walking past red-roofed houses and pizza places and gelaterias wafting vanilla and sugar into the street. Kids playing and cats looking well-fed. Nice little town. I took the fifth notebook from there. Outside the center with all them shops were cul-de-sacs of sleepy houses and I guess it was junk collection day because a bunch of them had things sitting out on the curb, or whatever they call it in Italian. The word's not in my head. I found a long-sleeved shirt I thought might fit me and some packages of expired crackers that were only stale and a pair of broken nail scissors I thought I could fix and the notebook, which I wasn't sure I was going to take until I saw someone watching me and I panicked and walked away still holding it in my hand with my backpack flopping open.

Well it turned out I was glad I took it, since I didn't like to look at the first notebook and the third I burned and the fourth was for nice things and the second was getting full up. The fifth was just a cheap spiral-bound book of graph paper like you'd give a kid for school but it was real pleasant to write in and so I started right away. Only a handful of pages left in the second one and it felt almost powerful that little bit of waste. I had next door to nothing but I wasn't beholden to anybody or anything and if I wanted to leave some blank pages then I damn well could do. It was around then I started thinking about the sixth notebook even though it didn't exist yet. See I got across Italy pretty quick and moved onto the south of France without so much as looking down the boot, but I snuck my way into a hotel room in Sanremo my last night there so I could sleep on a mattress for once, and on my way out in the morning the desk clerk was listening to a radio show in English and the radio show was FBI This Week. I must've looked interested instead of shit-scared like I felt on the inside because the kid says listen to this! like it was a ball game and his team was about to make a grand slam. And what the host was talking about on his hoaky little Most Wanted roundup was the DC Killer. Except it wasn't exactly, because now they were calling me the Winter Soldier on account of those files going live and they weren't just talking about DC but the whole damn century, and I stood there and listened and got angrier and angrier and finally I just left because if I didn't I would've broken something, maybe that kid's laptop. Hundreds of murders they were pinning on me since all the way back to 1946 when I was still bleeding and screaming and pleading on a metal table. 1946 when the freak hadn't even got me back yet.

You know how much cryogenics fucking costs to run? You know how much God damn time and care it takes to unload a human being and wipe it and prep it and make sure its mushy fucking brains understand the mission you're giving it? You know how many tests you got to run before you can be certain it's not going to malfunction and take a twenty million dollar swan dive off a fucking building? Hundreds my ass. Do the math. Five or six a year if they started me in '53 like the files say they did but I bet you anything that was one of the two guys they ran before me, since I'm pretty sure my first mission was '56 after the first guy got too much of the freak's new rocket fuel and hemorrhaged to death and the other one shot himself in the face. That's a murder every two months and pal I got news for you if you think that's sustainable practice. Some years they didn't take me out at all. Me and HYDRA and the scrambled eggs between my ears assassinated maybe four dozen people at the worst. A few more probably when they tested me in the gulags but by the time I got to them those people weren't people in the same way I wasn't people. Now I'm not saying each and every one of those deaths don't cut me to ribbons because see Jews we believe when you save a life you save a whole world, but when you take a life you destroy a whole world too. What I'm saying is those deaths kill me no more and no less than all the others. Look up my record in the army files. 219 confirmed January '44 to February '45 oh Lordy a marksman like me lines them up and knocks them down. Why isn't anybody after me for all them German boys, sweetheart? All's fair in love and war they say. Well I say fair's a matter of who's holding the stick.

Once I stopped feeling like I could chew rocks and nut God I started thinking about getting the real story out there somehow. Lord knows how I really would've done it if I'd decided I was going to stand and deliver but what it wound down to was this. What I'm writing now for myself. Which isn't so much of a manifesto as a mess but I feel better for it, scribbling alone at night writing down the truth. Truth. I guess that's not the right word. Not that I come into this aiming to lie you understand but there's really no such thing as the truth. Truth's a thing that's decided on and most of history's either a compromise or an agenda in the making. You can't measure it like weight or distance or time and you can't hold it up to the light and check for flaws. You got to crack it open to see what it's made of and then it's not truth anymore, not a story, just a big soggy heap of facts you can rearrange how you like. And you can't ever put it back again into the shell.

 

* * *

 

Real reason I'm in Ivano-Frankivsk isn't to sit in bars and drink soda and watch your pretty face on the television; I'm here for Ma. Since I couldn't go to her grave in New York I was thinking I'd go to the place she was born instead and that'd be a nicer thing anyway, thinking about life instead of death for a while. She and my aunts and my uncle and their parents left here in 1914 something like a month before the Great War broke out because she told me they'd only just left port in Southampton when the news came through the wireless. On that ship she met Da and his big Welsh family and he thought she was the prettiest and cleverest thing he'd ever seen, and he went ahead and pitched woo like it was his last chance on earth, and she said to him I will never marry a goy and three years later they had me and then Becks four years after that. I never seen a pair of people love each other like they did even when they fought. But Ma never really talked about where she grew up. When I was a kid I asked Sarah if she missed Ireland and she said no but in a funny kind of way that I thought maybe meant yes, a little, but when I asked Ma the same thing she didn't say yes or no. She said do you know why they call us the People of the Book? No I said. She said: because there's nowhere we can call home.

My momma's people didn't come from Ivano-Frankivsk but a place near here that folks once called Horokholyna if they called it anything at all. I guess it still exists because some people call the forest that and the river too, Horokholyn Lis, the place where the peas grow, but when it had a proper name there was a different country here and its borders got erased a long ways back. Ivano-Frankivsk was called a different thing then too. Like Azzano the houses are new and you don't have to dig far to find old bricks and bullets and probably bones. In the cemeteries I'll give you three guesses whose gravestones are knocked down or broken or missing and the first two guesses don't count. I looked and looked but I couldn't find one with my momma's maiden name. You can tell the Jew graves still standing because even when they don't have Hebrew they got lions or deer or books or all kinds of things on them you don't see on the other stones. Mostly lions though. If you walk around between the towns where the old crumbly places are you find shuls abandoned and covered in graffiti and worse things, but almost all of them still have murals on the walls inside and it's lion after lion after lion. I guess folks around here were dawn people because the Shulchan Aruch says to rouse yourself in the morning like a lion to serve your God. Ma told that to us when Becks was real little and for the next week she woke me up roaring. Well I guess the locals here didn't like that because they scratched off most of those lions' faces a long time ago and that's not nearly the only thing they took away. Half the cobblestones here are Yid it seems. Tombstones I mean. They took them from the cemeteries. You walk on us everywhere you go.

My momma's people wouldn't have gone to a big fancy synagogue in the city but I couldn't go where they went because it's not there, all them country shuls gone or abandoned or turned into churches or turned into museums full of Virgin Marys with their sad sad eyes. Probably in actual fact her folks didn't go to a shul at all but a shtiebel in the forest and God knows that's gone too. Everything's gone out here. Back to the wild grasses and the climbing weeds. An old woman caught me crawling around in what turned out to be her back garden and I said I'm sorry I'm just looking for—and then I couldn't say what it was because I didn't really know. I'm looking for the houses I didn't say. I'm looking for the dead. I'm looking for my momma. I'm looking for me. As I was apologizing and getting the hell out of there I thought about asking her if she remembered anybody from before, but in the end I didn't because I realized she was too young and what an awful thought that was. Seventy maybe eighty years old and too young to remember the way things were. Ivano-Frankivsk had a hundred thousand people in it before the War I learned and thirty thousand of them Jews. Not any more. Aroysgevorfen. What a God damn waste.

When I found the one and only shul still standing I nearly missed it. Right in the middle of town and painted rose-petal pink: impossible to miss you'd think, but the thing is they put a shop in the front of it. Furniture. Hardware. Big flashing signs. It's only the first floor but it took me two times walking past to see the little menorah on the side and the littler plaque that said the building was the Great Synagogue. Could've fooled me, sister. Well it turns out if you're a Jew you have to go around the back. Story of our lives. Just shadows inside where the pews used to be and on top of them a few rows of folding chairs all patchy and worn. I stopped inside the door and for a minute I didn't think I could go on, but the rabbi popped up from behind the bimah with a screwdriver looking like he was on a desert island and I was ten barrels of clean water and then I couldn't not. Gutn tog Rebbe I said without thinking and then I thought maybe that wasn't right these days, so I said uh shalom aleichem? And then I thought maybe that wasn't right either so I said: dobryj den? And that rabbi blinked and then he laughed. Borekh habo! he said. We have a polygot here today he said in Yiddish. How many languages do you speak my friend? I dunno I said. And I knew right away that wasn't the right answer because his face did something strange, so real quick I said rebbe I'm looking for my family.

Yes he said sadly. So are we all.

Well to make a long story short he didn't have no more than I had already, the records being destroyed and my momma's folks not living in the city proper and me not having all the names anyway, and that's about what I figured, but it was nice to sit with him and talk for a while in the old tongue in that old shul. Once he put his hand on my arm and it was the left one, and I saw him feel that it wasn't skin and bone under there but he didn't pull away, just kept his hand there on my wrist like I was a person and not a gun or a ghost or a thing to fuck and it was maybe the nicest thing that'd happened to me in weeks. I told him that. This is the nicest thing that's happened to me in weeks I said. Stay he said. I can't I said, I have to keep moving. That was a lie because I'd been there four days already and here I am writing this staying another night. Stay he said: it's Friday. Stay for dinner at least. And he looked so hopeful I just couldn't say no. It'll be fine I thought it's only dinner. I think maybe every time I think something'll be fine I should smack myself because oh brother am I ever a bad judge of that.

First off there were more people than just me and the rabbi, and also I hadn't done kiddush in seventy years, so there I was with all these old people trying my damnedest to remember the motions when what the rabbi pulls out instead of wine is schnapps. Well Lord have mercy but that's when I started to cry because that's what we used at home and maybe I should've been expecting it but I wasn't. I thought they were going to ask me what my problem was but the old men on either side of me just put their hands on my shoulders and then the rabbi said James would you make kiddush? and he passed me the becher. Oh God I thought I don't remember. I don't remember if I should sit or stand and I don't remember when I drink and I don't remember the words and I'm sitting there with the cup feeling like everybody's staring at the glove on my left hand and me sitting there with wet face and my mouth open not saying anything. The old man on my left patted my arm and the old man on my right whispered vayehi erev vayehi voker and that was all it took. A whole world rushing back into me then and in the candlelight it was like all them decades never took place and I was in Brooklyn and war was a thing that happened to other people long ago, and just for a second I wasn't scared. Yom hashishi I said and the rabbi smiled and I kept going. And I didn't mess up. Not once. I snuck out before services but in a way I didn't need to hear them because I was so full of everything else. Thankfulness and fury and hope. After seventy years of nothing that little drop was like a whole gallon. Dayenu, I guess.

It was enough.

 

 

* * *

 

I used to be able to play the piano middling to good but I can't now at all. I think that's strange. You'd think it would come back with everything else. I can still ride a bicycle and I just learned I can still remember the prayers and I still brush my hair back from my forehead with the same motion I learned from watching Da, who I suppose learned from watching someone else in his time. But the piano's gone. I sat down on the bench in a cafe in Hastings and I thought I'll play Pack Up Your Troubles and I put my fingers on the keys and nothing happened. It wasn't at all like being shot is what I want to say, because I've been shot and there's nothing like it, but what happens in your head when you've been shot is the same thing I felt then with my fingers dumb on the keys; terror and resignation and that soaring woozy wonderment. And in some ways it hurt just as bad.

Before I sat on that bench I cut through Spain and jilted Paris and had a grand old time taking the Chunnel. If I could show my ten year old self anything it'd be the spaceships and then it'd be that damn fine piece of engineering in second place. Dublin is where I went first and got myself raked over the coals like I said, and then I stayed in England maybe the longest I stayed anywhere except Mongolia, bouncing around here there and everywhere. London mostly is where I stayed. London's full of tourists the whole year and not a single person looked at me like I was a psychopath, especially since by then I'd cleaned up some. I'd skirted the coast for a while and picked a barber shop in the middle of nowhere deliberately near closing expecting some old salt to shave me within an inch of my life. What I got was a young man, tattoos up his arms and piercings all over, handsome as anything and gentle with me as a handful of eggs. He took off my mountain-man beard and trimmed up the ragged ends of my hair and when I looked in that mirror I could not believe my eyes. It's not fair to say I hadn't seen that guy since 1942, because I didn't look anything like little Bucky Barnes before the War swallowed him feet first, my hair long like a girl's and my bones laying heavier under my skin and my eyes'll never look like his again, but that's still what I thought then greeting myself in the mirror. Hello. Fancy seeing you around here, soldier. My momma would have recognized me for sure. I'm good-looking I thought for the first time in years or maybe decades and surprised the hell out of myself.

The barber had been flirting in a casual way but after we got that beard off me he thought so too, because he whistled and said wow you're a regular David Beckham under there aren't you mate? I didn't know who that was but it sounded like a compliment. Then at the door the barber said hold up I know exactly what you need, and he locked up the shop and put his hand on my elbow. Probably sounding real tired I said: a good dicking? The barber laughed. If you say so he said. Come with. So I came with and he lead me down to the water and took off his shoes and rolled up his cuffs, and I copied him. Into the ocean we walked to our knees. The barber said my grandmum always says the cure for everything is salt water. Sweat tears or the sea. Personally I prefer the sea he said. I don't feel cured I said but I was lying. The day was warm and muggy and the water was cool as mint, and under my toes were smooth pebbles and the gentle grit of sand and not so far away I could hear gulls calling. Look the barber said, and marching in the water between our feet there was a tiny blue crab. I crouched down without thinking and soaked the seat of my pants but I didn't notice until later I was so absorbed in watching that little creature. Necora puber the barber said, the velvet swimming crab, and I said: you some kind of scientist? And he said no I just like them. What's your name he said. James I said. Are you a veteran James he said. I said yeah. I'm sorry he said, I hope things get better for you soon. And I said sweetheart they already are.

Things like that happened over and over for weeks and that's why eventually I left. Folks so kind I started worrying someday someone was going to be too kind and get too close and I was going to get somebody hurt. I guess you could say that was a silly notion to worry about but it sure as hell didn't feel silly at the time. Scary things on the news then coming out of America. The President talking about mutants but he was calling them inhumans. The press jerking themselves over the Advanced Threat Containment Unit and how it was SHIELD but better and oh boy have I heard that line before. We just want to know where everyone is they say but there's always a step two. They always come for you in the end. It's like nobody learned anything at all these past seventy years.

Well speaking of which I'd never been to Germany, even for them, so I thought it would be nice to see it recovered from all those wars and probably containing no more Nazis by volume than anywhere else. I didn't stay long and I couldn't tell you why. Hearing the language I guess and the accent, and no matter how hard I tried to convince my brain that the freak hadn't even been German he was Swiss it didn't make any difference. Walking on eggshells for two days and halfway expecting the freak to jump up from behind a hedge and yell boo. It rained those two days straight through and matched my mood just fine. Brain's a funny thing. Anytime I could've picked myself up and dusted myself off, and I know I could've gotten out of the country faster than I did but some part of me just wanted to wallow in my misery for a little while like it was a warm blanket. Once you get to be a person again there's a certain kind of comfort in being as low as you can get and as far down as you can fall, I guess because it's like letting the horse take over again. Too easy. You just let go. But of all things it was my vanity that got me back on level ground. Up until I looked in that barbershop mirror I hadn't much cared what I looked like aside from unrecognizable, and the only time it mattered otherwise was when I was trying to blend in with civilized folks, but I was just about at the border when I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window trudging along in the rain with my sour face and my hair dripping and looking generally like a hunchback getting ready for his next beating. I thought about what that barber'd say and then like getting punched in the gut I thought God almighty what would your sister think of you now. All cleaned up and acting like you're wading through shit. Well I took myself into the very next coffee shop I saw and spent ten minutes in the bathroom making myself look presentable, and then I went to the till and ordered a meal in perfect Berlinerisch and winked at the boy behind the counter and nearly made him drop my receipt. And wouldn't you know it but that felt a damn sight better than thinking about all the bad things that happened to me.

I'm sharing all this mostly on account of you needing the backstory for how I started the sixth notebook. You'll laugh because it was mostly by accident. I was going to pull out the fifth notebook and write about my peacocking and what I ate and how the kaffeehaus was right on the river Oder and how pretty it was, but as I was reaching into my backpack I was thinking without thinking exactly about the freak and the past and how sometimes it's not the victors who get to write history, and as I'm rifling around trying to find the God damn thing and thinking probably I should throw out half the shit I was carrying around, what happened was I looked up and about two feet away from me was one of those creaky revolving touristy things. Those always make me nervous because I think I'm going to knock them down and spill all the books and them stupid little pamphlets but this time the selection wasn't so bad. This one had notebooks on one side, nice sealed-up ones made of fake leather with an elastic and a ribbon and probably nice paper. What it reminded me of right away was the really nice sketchbooks they used to have in the book shops when we were coming up, the ones they imported from France and Italy that you always looked at but never bought because you were a cheapskate and admittedly the price could've got you a week's worth of groceries instead. Well maybe it was mean but what I caught myself thinking was I could buy one with my stolen card and then I'd have something you didn't. Later I looked it up and found out you're some kind of millionaire now and you probably have dozens of books loads nicer than this crummy Made In China knockoff but I didn't know that then. All I knew was I had to have me one of those notebooks. And I was going to show that no-good clammy-handed little butchering freak a thing or two about who gets to write the histories.

 

* * *

 

Ivano-Frankivsk still Heaven help me. I don't know where I'm going next. That's not a problem I've had up until now between letting the horse take the wheel and trying to get to somewhere specific whether I stayed very long or not. I haven't seen Wilson on my tail for a month now. I got to wonder if maybe settling down somewhere for a little while would be good for me or the dumbest fucking idea I've had since Greece.

It's only that man wasn't meant to wander forever. Octyabr and her people take rests through the seasons and hell even Moses quit leading us around by the nose after forty years, and I bet at the end of it folks were gladder than anything to shut their doors and never leave home again. Well I got that beat because I haven't put down roots since they shipped me out in '43. Every morning I keep waking up and thinking I got to leave and then I think about that nice rabbi and his pink shul and I don't want to, and then this morning the first thing I thought was: I want to do something. And I got that big flood of fear like I got writing about Mongolia thinking about how few years I got left and how many I've wasted or someone else wasted for me, all them things I wanted to do when I was a kid and a teenager and an adult I guess, although I don't know now if I can think of the me they called up to war an adult. In all the ways that mattered he was still a little boy and he had so much life in him then. He wanted to do things and he wanted to learn things and he wanted to figure out how the universe worked, him bent over his papers at Princeton thinking grand old thoughts and Lord was he full of wonder then. This morning it felt like we were waving at each other across a great big valley and he was shouting but I couldn't hear him. All I knew was I wanted to.

Well seeing as how I want to stay the hell away from Russia I guess I'll go west or south and see what happens. And if I find me another nice rabbi and another pink shul then maybe I'll stay a little while, wherever that is.

 

* * *

 

I wonder sometimes what's in those graves of ours. Seems to me you can't have a grave without something in it. It doesn't have to be a body I know that for a fact. Parts they bury all the time, and ashes and whatever's left over, gold teeth and false knees and metal plates and screws and things we don't carry inside us too, stolen coins down Money Pits and boats beneath San Francisco and planes in Iraq and all them barrels of death under Yucca Mountain waiting for some poor shovel-happy schlemiel to stick his nose in. You can bury your feelings and you can bury the hatchet and you can bury your head in the sand. So what did they bury when they buried us without our bodies? Is it like mailing an empty box? Package arrives in the World To Come and God opens it and there's nothing inside and boy I bet that must be a disappointment. Well you and me we got a problem staying dead it seems. When we both come to die for real they'll have to stake us down. I don't doubt you've got different plans but wouldn't it be nice if we shared a grave like we shared a bed once upon a time in the innocence of our youth. I made myself laugh just then. When were we ever innocents I ask you. Oh but wouldn't it be lovely though. Wouldn't it be warm. The two of us our skin our bones all wrapped up together just the two of us embracing in the damp earth. I don't believe in heaven, sweetheart, but that I wouldn't mind.

Do you think of me I wonder. Do you miss me. Seen your friend plenty but I haven't seen you and I got to wonder if you're doing your civic duty. Way you brought me down I thought I'd see you long ago: your face at my door, your fingers tapping on my window, your feet on the streets of the cities I ran through scared and halfway looking for you too. I would've run if I saw you but I would've looked over my shoulder. Lot's wife. Folks say she was stupid but I think I know how she felt inside as she turned knowing towards the fire. Lord have mercy I hope you never find out the kind of things I'd do for you.

Where are you right now, sunshine? Where are you, sweetheart? Are you chasing me down? Are you sleeping? Are you wide awake in your room with your hand on your heart are you dreaming? Are you thinking of me or the river or God almighty our old country back when? Are you alone in the night in the dark in your bed with the blinds drawn tight are you listening? Are you hoping I'll tap on your window? I wonder do you think of your name in my mouth. I would. I did. Earlier thinking of you. I thought wouldn't it be something if I—  And then I thought he never has to know. My hand down my shorts like a kid who can't help it at all. I thought would you like it. I thought would you want. I pictured you this way and that and I turned you and posed you and wondered. I imagined you loving it and I imagined you hating it and I imagined everything in between as I laid there loving it hating myself. Easy to imagine you. They made me good with faces, sweetheart, and I was always good with yours. Touching myself in the dark wondering would you. My dry hand catching careful slow but I could imagine your mouth. Edge of my nail like the edge of your teeth oh God I don't doubt what you'd be like on your knees.

Easy to love you when I can't see you. Easy to love you when you're not here dragging me down into the water. Easy to love a figment that loves easy back. You loved bottomless and bloody like it was a thing worth dying for but not once in your life did you ever love easy. Oh sweetheart why'd God have to make us fit so perfect and then deck us in spines. The way you looked at me after the factory I used to think if only I had a little more peace and a few more hours in the day we could've come together before the bells rang out Armistice around the world. If only I'd looked as good in a red dress as her. The way you looked at me in the field sometimes the way you looked at her across a table full of maps. To anyone else you might've just looked angry but I know better. I know you. How about it now, tiger? Would you take a chance on an old soldier? Would you dress me up in red? Would you show me how they do it in the future? Would you show me what you've learned? Would you love me across a table too?

  


* * *

  


After Germany is when I really leapfrogged around. Poland I left after I stumbled across the first camp and Austria I left because I caught myself trying to find where I fell, and then back through Germany because hell if I was going through Italy again or God help me Switzerland, then I went to New York and you know what happened there. Or didn't. London to Brussels to Prague up through into Lithuania and so tired there I burrowed into a hole and slept for twenty-one hours straight. When I woke up the sun was setting red on the red brick around me and the leaves on the trees red too, and it took me a while to realize I'd fallen asleep in what was left of a castle in the forest. Quiet there like nothing I've ever known, not even in Mongolia where sounds carry miles echoing weirdly over the plains. The papery rustle of the leaves when the wind picked up and the noises I was making and that was all. The next day I went exploring and startled a load of deer and down in a gully I found an old train engine and a couple of cabooses. When I dug a bit on the hill I found where the tracks used to be so I guess when the train outlived its usefulness they rolled it out here and pushed it off. I knew it wasn't a wreck because it was laying so neat, covered all over with moss and creeping things and layers of dead leaves. When I crawled inside I found them swept up into the corners like sand in those Roman ruins and the wood all warped and splintered from the wet and mushrooms growing on the seats. I've never seen anything inanimate that looked more like a corpse than that train but I couldn't shake the feeling it was alive somehow. Lonesome ancient thing breathing out there in the dark. When we were kids Ma told us stories about the Behemoth and the Ziz and especially the Leviathan, of which there were two until God killed one so their offspring wouldn't crush the whole of the earth, and I used to imagine the hugeness of it moving under the water searching for its mate with glowing eyes and calling out mournful in its sea-bellied voice. That's what I was thinking then as I was touching the warm metal of the train and pressing my ear against it trying to hear its heart. I felt sorry for it out there all forgotten.

Writing this now it looks like I'm talking about me. Looks like a metaphor for how I was old and warped and lonely too and feeling sorry for my own self by way of that train. Well I'm telling you it didn't feel like that at the time and let me be the first to say not everything has to mean two things at once. Can't a person just feel these days without some know-it-all telling them they're feeling something else? Enough news I've watched now to know folks these days will analyze anything, all them shrinks measuring their dicks talking about triggers and neuroses and childhood trauma like up there in their ivory tower they'd know anything about it at all. Well I stayed with that train three days on account of I felt sorry for it and that's all it was. Maybe if anything I was hoping it was magic. It sure felt that way. I guess I was hoping maybe something would happen if I gave it enough time, if I loved it like some engineer loved it a century or two ago. I won't ever admit it out loud but it's all right to tell you here that what I did on the last day was I gave it some blood. I cut my hand and smeared it on the brake lever only about ninety percent sure it wasn't going to wake up. I know that was a stupid idea because if there's one thing the old stories are certain about it's that anything that can be woken up with blood definitely shouldn't be. Wouldn't that have been something. I feel like you would've appeared at the crucial moment with your shield in hand. What've you been up to Buck? you might ask me and I'd say oh not much just ending the world how about you. Well nothing happened of course but I walked out of that valley not looking back. Just in case.

Took me a longer time going south than it had going east because I decided to walk again. For a while after New York wrung me out I wasn't eating right, but in Lithuania and Belarus winter was coming on and all the restaurants and cafes and farmsteads and food trucks out in the middle of nowhere were serving up hot things you could smell from a mile away. None of it kosher but I didn't worry about that in the War neither. In Belarus especially it was close enough. They learned from the Jews what to do with a potato I can tell you that for a fact and I ate my weight in draniki and kolduny until I couldn't see my ribs no more, even with all the walking.

Well I walked and walked and walked and what happened was I walked into a place I didn't understand. First thing I saw and avoided was a whole heap of men tearing down buildings and putting up what looked to me like the biggest sports stadium on God's green earth. Awful funny place for a thing like that I thought, but then really it wasn't that much weirder than the fake canals and hills and things they were building in Ayla when I was staring over at Israel. Way back when folks thought putting up the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower was a waste of time and who was I to judge millennium sensibilities. But then I found the city. See in Azzano and loads of other places the War hit all the buildings were new, but the thing is people were living in them. The city I found was new and there was no one there at all. Windows dark and broken and the doors all hanging open and long cracks in the roads full of weeds and cars sitting without wheels. I thought maybe there was a fire but nothing was scorched, and I thought maybe there was a Depression but there was too much stuff left behind, and I thought maybe there was a war but there were no shell holes, and besides which there was enough moss and crumble that it hadn't happened yesterday and people should've come back. But no one had. An eerie feeling let me tell you walking those empty streets and looking in them broken windows. Plates on tables and toys on chairs. It was like the Angel of Death swept through and instead of taking the firstborn it took up everybody at once bodies and all. A plague or a curse or something not of this earth.

It was only later I found out what it was called and what happened there and how glad I was that I hadn't felt the need to drink the water in the rivers. I doubt it would've shortened my life any but that's not the sort of thing you gamble on. Sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking what happened to me was the worst thing that could happen to anybody and then sometimes I hit a thing like that city and I feel lower than dirt being so self centered. Folks leaving everything behind except the hot new atoms in their bones. Never getting to come back. I read the army had to come through and shoot all the left-behind pets so they wouldn't infect any of the people cleaning it up or carry the sickness out and away. Well too late for that is frankly what I thought but I guess you do what you can when there's so little you can fix. I read that the stadium-thing is a huge confinement for the place where it all went wrong. That's smart. Dangerous things like that should be sealed away tight with a big warning label slapped on top. We Made A Mistake Here maybe. A quote from Frankenstein or maybe the other Shelley, look on my works ye mighty and so forth. If I was in charge though what I would've done instead of concrete is make it out of special glass so folks could look in and see. Some monsters you ought to keep your eye on.

 

* * *

 

I guess you're thinking all I know is Jew stories but I know stories that aren't. I remember Sarah told us a good one and it goes like this.

There was once a man named Reprobus and he was from a far-off land where everyone was very tall and had the heads of dogs instead of people. Maybe you think they sound fearsome like werewolves but they were nice quiet pagan farming folk and their god a golden cow. Now Reprobus was ambitious and didn't want to farm. What he wanted was to serve the greatest man in the world, so what does he do but light out and see if he can find this man. He finds one king who everyone says is the greatest man alive but Reprobus catches the king crossing himself when somebody mentions the devil and he thinks this king ain't so great if he's afraid of the devil. Reprobus carries on and finds a man who claims to be the devil. Well great thinks Reprobus, if everyone is scared of the devil then he must be the greatest man in the world, but one day Reprobus catches the devil-man avoiding a holy symbol, and he thinks the devil ain't so great if he's afraid of God. So Reprobus he goes and finds a hermit and he says I want to serve God. And the hermit looks at this great big guy with his great big dog head and the hermit says oh brother I know exactly what you can do. You see there's a river people are trying to cross and it's very dangerous and they keep dying, but you could probably walk across it without even getting your nuts damp. That's a great way to serve God. Clever hermit is what I say, but Reprobus says sure and he goes and spends his days carrying people across the river. Well one day a little boy comes and asks to be carried and Reprobus does as he always does and starts wading across, except this time the river roars up to his waist and the boy feels like he's getting heavier and heavier, and Reprobus he starts getting worried about whether he's even going to make it to the other side and in the end he just barely does. Wow says Reprobus as he puts the boy down. It felt like I was carrying the whole universe on my shoulders he says. And the little boy says: you were.

I guess it's supposed to be an allegory about how being a good person is hard and how much responsibility God has and all that chewy stuff but I don't know exactly. When we were kids and Sarah told us the story we were a lot more interested in the land where everyone has heads like dogs than we were about the moral, and I don't remember ever asking. What I was thinking just now is whether Reprobus ever wished he'd gone back to the land of the dog-heads to become a farmer or whether he was happy. I wonder if he missed home. I wonder if he felt lonely being the only one like him everywhere he went. Story doesn't say. Maybe if Reprobus was telling the story it'd be different. You could say well probably he didn't exist but I can't believe there never lived anybody in history who wasn't at least a little like him. Tall guy with a strange face maybe or a deformity or just foreign. If there's one thing people like it's telling stories about people who aren't like them and they'll make up differences if they can't find any. I guess we have to assume he was happy. Story's too sad any other way.

Reason I was thinking about Reprobus is on account of I'm feeling more and more like a fish out of water myself. Trying to catch up on everything I've missed but it's hard when I never stay more than a few days in one place. Forcing my body into a new dance every few days as I pass from place to place and read the way people move around each other so I can slap it on my own bones. It's not an easy way to live and I'm getting mighty tired. News has been quiet and hell if somebody was going to find me surely they'd have found me by now. Maybe I can afford to pick a spot and settle for a while. Oh Lord let this be the right decision. Let me not regret this please God.

 

* * *

 

Nope. Hell no. I'm not ready.

Keep moving, Barnes. Keep on moving.

 

* * *

 

Odessa. Well just south of it I guess; I wanted to see the ocean again. I've been inland for so long. I'm in a restaurant here that's as close to being on the water as you can get without sitting in it and it's just me and the waitress who's reading a textbook at the bar and the chef in the back. Spring storm throwing rain and spray and little bits of debris at the windows. The Black Sea's just a name normally but today it's a fact and so's the sky. That's not quite true I guess. The sea's not black but a dark dark green cloudy with sand and kelp and whatever else is out there, squid ink or whale blood or Leviathan maybe. I haven't seen waves like this since the hurricane of '38. Do you remember? All the bath houses and Coast Guard stations swept away and boats thrown out of the water along the coast and Montauk was an island for a little while, and the MacKay radio towers blown over. The East River flooding all the way to 133rd. You remember? You staying with me and Becks because our parents were upstate visiting cousins, and we thought what the hell we'll build a couch fort like kids but we took a bottle of whiskey in like we weren't. Becks at seventeen holding her liquor better than either of us. We were all laughs until the lights went out. Not the first hurricane we had or even the worst but that one just got to us, something about the sound the wind made as it came through the buildings wailing like a hundred ghosts. I don't know. It's too open here for the wind to make any noise besides roaring but I'm thinking of '38 all the same.

I haven't looked up what happened to Becks yet. I know she must be dead but I can't stand knowing when or how or thinking about what I was doing when she was shuffling off to sleep. I can hope it was peaceful and that's about all I can manage. Usually I dream about nonsense things but lately I've been dreaming about her, and I keep thinking of the way her face was so funnily made up and how it hardly held any expression at all for the most part, hard and flat like a china doll's and what a surprise when she laughed. Ma's nose and cheekbones and Da's lantern jaw and that scar through her eyebrow from when she fell and split it on the leg of a chair when she was six. I remember holding her for the doctor to stitch up and she watched the needle go in and out like it was nothing, like he was darning a sock. Looked like a fighter but wasn't she sweet. Her and our grandma's mandolin, playing it so careful at my bar mitzvah and sorrowful wild at Sarah's wake and oh her fingers on those strings you'd think she was born with the wood in her hands. You and her spent so much time together when she turned eighteen that I thought I saw which way the wind was blowing, and I finally pulled up my britches preparing to give my blessing and I went and asked her when was the wedding going to be. Oh Jaime she said. I'd never do that to you.

What a mensch.

 

 

I guess I'm going to keep on going south down the coast. I was thinking of going to Croatia because I heard they got a thing there called a sea organ. Some clever guy built pipes into the breakwater made special so that when the water comes in they play notes all at once like a whole woodwind orchestra. They say you can lay down in the sunshine with your cheek against the cement and you can hear the water moving down there and the beautiful sounds. Well mighty tempting as that is I don't want to go overland again for a little while and it's an awful long way around if I skirt the coast. Nearly back where I started. Of course the smart thing to do would be to wait out this storm and the next one they say is coming. There're worse places that's for sure. I like the sea and I like this restaurant and I think the waitress likes me too; she turned the television to baseball just for me. I don't know about these commercials though. On and on and on. Seems to me it was nicer sitting at a game with

 

* * *

 

Watching the news come out of Lagos. Oh sweetheart. God. That poor kid. I know that look. You better be keeping a fucking eye on her so she doesn't go add herself to the body count.

 

* * *

 

Press release. Your people move fast. I don't know why it needs to be said as how that kid was trying to save lives because it's obvious to anybody who's got eyes in their head. Wrong place wrong time and I guess the world would be better off if all them folks in the market got blown to bits instead, huh? The little people. No big deal. God damn but I can't get my eyes off that girl. You told her she's the spitting image of your best pal's mother? Maybe you're not that close but I saw you put your hand on her hand when one of those jackals asked her why she didn't just think that bomb in the other direction. Like he's ever used his brain to make anybody's life better let alone try to save one. Lord but you look like grim death. All of you do.

You're off air now but they're still talking about sanctions. International demand for oversight is what they're saying. Well that I don't doubt, but it's funny if you think about it. Folks perfectly all right with the enhanced risking their lives for the sake of humanity and taking up arms against the biggest threats on the planet but the very second God forbid somebody fucks up then suddenly it doesn't sound so appealing letting the monsters run free. Oh brother that story is old as time. Special ain't special. Didn't I say? If you'd all stopped and retired last year who'd be the first to come begging at your door next time death rained down from the sky? If you'd tried to hide who'd be the first to try to drag you into the light? HYDRA wanted everybody to be the same and what did they use to achieve it but a queer mutant Yid. They use the tools at hand, sweetheart. I was never a person to them and that's what made it so easy. This is what they do: when something needs killing they come and find you where you're sleeping, where you're sleeping sound in the ice, and they thaw you out, they wipe your past, they suit you up, they make you into a weapon a warning a symbol so everyone sees and knows and damn well believes in the truth that's been put on their plates. They wake you up and they give you a name and they put a thing in your hands and that thing is you, they say. You're a gun. You're a fist.

You're a shield.

Sound familiar?

You watch your God damn back.

 

* * *

 

Well I suppose you got to laugh but I found my nice rabbi and my pink shul, and it turns out you need a passport to get in and the police there are triple-checking every one. The especially funny thing is that I would if I had one because hell if I'm going anywhere else right now. Laying low like a mouse in my fucking hole. Squats everywhere here and I manage to find the one that overlooks Choral Temple. That's what they call it around here and I don't know if it's a pun on coral but that's the color of it all right and is it ever beautiful. I put newspaper on my windows only partially so nobody could see in and mostly so I can't see out. Looking at it hurts like a sore tooth.

Sixteen arrests here the last two days. For dissent they say and for protests and jaywalking and stealing and cutting in line but we know why really. All of them like you and me and that kid on your team. Fuck I hope she's okay. No wifi here on account of I'm too nervous to steal anything to use it with. Internet cafes are being watched. I got a radio I found in the trash and I can't seem to make it tune into anything but music so I don't know what's going on outside the city let alone across the ocean. For a crazy hour I thought about going deep and breaking those folks out and starting my own little underground fucking railroad for mutants but I stopped myself before I turned into you and did something really dumb. If I fucked up they'd have a superweapon and I don't have a damn thing I could kill myself with if the worst should happen. I don't even know how I'd make it stick. How the fuck do you test a thing like that. I guess I got to think about going to Russia because hell if I'm giving them the satisfaction of going back to that pit in DC. If that information's anywhere it'll be in the God damn Soviets' God damn manuals. Shit.

I hate this.

I hate this.

 

* * *

 

Managed to get out the last three days to buy food and more importantly newspapers. Sounds like they're threatening that girl Maximoff with deportation but I know you won't let that happen. Lots of talk about Sokovia and finally some answers and have you ever once since the War stopped risking your life for a single God damn week? Lord all fucking mighty. I'd strangle you myself if I didn't think you'd like it.

Found out by accident my neighbor's a mutant too. Scared the shit out of each other three times, once when we ran into each other and once when I reacted too quick to be normal and once when her skin flickered purple around her eyes and nose. She saw me see it and pulled me into the room she was squatting in and she made me swear a bunch of bloodcurdling oaths that I wasn't going to say nothing, and I swore all right, but I also said look and I took a rock she had for wedging against the door and I crushed it with my right hand. Well I guess she realized I wasn't going to squeal because she got up and made us tea and brought out cookies she'd stolen when everyone had their faces glued to the news, and she said I'm Yulia. I'm James I said. When did your powers come in she said. Never I said and showed her my shoulder. They did it to me I said. Oh Jesus she said, this fucking world. She told me later how she was eleven and like every kid she wanted to be different and unique and when it turned out she really really was she ran away from home. She wants to go back but with everything happening now she's too scared.

My parents died not knowing I was still alive I said. When it's safe you should go home.

I will she said. I will.

Tonight she's taking me to a place where there's a few like us living rough. Not to do anything but just to meet them and let them see my face. Looking out for each other is what Yulia says. I'm scared but I thought of Sarah and her meetings and her pamphlets and what she used to say about standing up for the truth. Well I'm not standing up for anything right now but maybe I can help a few kids not die. That'd be something at least. I think your ma might be proud.

 

* * *

 

God help me I was saying kids on account of I feel so old but Yulia's people really are just kids. Fourteen fifteen sixteen years old running scared as rabbits and living in the sewers. None of them can hide in plain sight because one's got skin like a rock and one's got four arms and one's next door to being a snake and the youngest one's got wings so big he can't hardly stand up. Looking at them I felt like my heart was going to beat itself to death on my ribs. First thing I did was check them all out medically speaking because down there was giving me the crawling horrors and I can't even get sick, and second thing I did was fortify their hidey hole a little so it was harder to spot and had something they could use as an escape route, because it was a kill box for fuck's sake, and the third thing I did was teach Yulia how to avoid detection a hell of a lot better because one day she's going to lead the cops straight down here, chameleon powers or not. I told them I was bugging out the second it was safe to leave the country and I'd get them over the border if they wanted, but none of them did. City was their home and I guess I understand that right enough. When the whole world's after you anyway, there's no place safer than the place you know.

 

* * *

 

Newspapers today just as histrionic as the last fucking week.

Shit.

I got to get out of here.

 

* * *

 

I nearly panicked and ran but in the end I got a grip on myself, by which I mostly mean I wrapped myself up in blankets so tight I could barely breathe and struggled inside them until I'd worn myself out and slept six hours and then I did it again. Glad I stayed put because things have simmered down a little. It's getting to crunch time on the elections here and I guess the imprisonment of civilians is just a little too controversial for everybody's campaigns. Bunch of sissies. They could learn a fucking thing or two from Roosevelt I tell you what. Not that I'm complaining really I'm not. Cops are getting put back in whatever pockets they came out of and people are letting their kids play in the streets again and you can practically feel the whole city breathing deep. From the sounds of it school teachers are planning to strike pretty soon and that'll take off some more heat from us and from this damn UN conference folks are talking about. The hell do they think they're going to ratify that won't be the biggest violation of human rights in the last fifty years?

Well I guess I just answered my own question. We're not human to them, are we.

I guess you got your own problems still but we're not hearing about them here. America's superhero drama lost its shine pretty quick if the newspaper folks are anything to go by but you never can tell who's greasing which palm these days. Fair and balanced seems like a thing of the past. Maybe that means everything's okay. No news is good news and all that shit we tell ourselves when we're so scared we can't think straight. I'd like to believe that's true. Just don't you go borrowing trouble sweetheart because I know what you're like when you see something headed south. Am I ever glad you're not here right now.

I told Yulia she has a week to be a better chameleon. Well she's just told me that she's figured out how to make herself look like one of those big black garbage bags, and if she's right it's a great piece of camouflage but I'm skeptical. I'm writing this now because I'm waiting for her to hide in the pile of trash in the alley. She passes if I can't find her in sixty seconds. Wish her luck because she's going to need it.

 

* * *

 

She passed.

 

* * *

 

Today Yulia asked me to tell her about myself and fair enough since she's already given me her life story and a few appendices besides. Well I couldn't go and tell her about how I'm Sergeant James Barnes late of HYDRA for God's sake so instead I told her the story about Rabbi Lev and Father Michael.

Well you remember how Rabbi Lev spoke maybe ten words of English and half of those were cuss words and Father Michael was the kind of Irishman who fancied himself an Englishman and probably came into the midwife's hands already starched, and so by virtue of them simply being their own selves any meeting between them was bound to come to spiritual blows if not the other kind. Father Michael wasn't Rabbi Lev's biggest fan from the get-go on account of you coming to shul with us a few times and going back and asking questions just a little too big for your britches, and Rabbi Lev was the kind of nice guy who pissed off half the people he met on account of being so relentlessly amiable they figured he must be laughing at them inside. Rabbi Lev aside of being the rabbi was also a teacher at the yeshiva, and when we all begged to start up our own baseball team like the other yeshivas had around then well Rabbi Lev was the only one who would agree to coach us, and wouldn't you know he turned out to be a God damn prodigy. Lumpy little guy from Prague who didn't know which end of a bat you were supposed to hold at first, but he picked it up like he probably picked up Talmud as a kid because the guy was smart as a whip when he wasn't pretending otherwise. We played a bunch of the other yeshivas through the seasons and by and large we beat them, maybe half because we were a real determined bunch of nuts and half because of Rabbi Lev. And then Father Michael decided his team was going to beat us.

You weren't on his team because you missed a crucial training season being real sick but I remember you and Sarah came to watch, alongside maybe three quarters of the neighborhood making them jerry-built stands creak. To local folks this was bigger than Dodgers versus Yankees. Jews versus Christians. It was the Roman Colosseum all over again and I have no doubt the betting was fierce. Well I won't recall inning by inning but what happened was that game had maybe the most injuries of any baseball game in history including the Major Leagues. One kid throwing up from nerves so bad he had to be taken home. One kid twisted his ankle and another his wrist. Three kids got bats to the head. Another kid tried to slide home and tripped and broke his nose. Another got a ball to the elbow. Of course the way it always works is that the best players were the ones who got knocked out so in the top half of the last inning we were pretty near tied up and it was decided that Rabbi Lev was going to go up to bat and Father Michael was going to pitch. 

What we knew but nobody else knew who didn't spend eight hours a day around the guy was that under that gentle cloak Rabbi Lev was a real competitive son of a bitch, and it was going to be a dark day in the yeshiva before he let a Christian minister beat his team on the field. Well Father Michael pitched one and Rabbi Lev didn't swing. And Father Michael pitched again and still Rabbi Lev didn't swing. Now he told us later he was aiming for a perfect open spot in outfield nobody was near, but what it looked like to us was that Father Michael pitched a third time and Rabbi Lev swung his bat in the most beautiful arc any of us had ever seen and he aimed that baseball like a sharpshooter right at the middle of Father Michael's freckled Irish face.

We were paying more attention to where the ball went and not the guy it hit, so we were all sliding home before we figured out exactly what'd happened and by then there was a big crowd of people around the pitch and we couldn't see anything. Next thing we knew Father Michael was being carried off the field on a stretcher and somebody told us he was going to the hospital. Later that afternoon we heard he was having surgery and that was when we all realized he'd been wearing his big old-fashioned glasses. That baseball had shattered them and sent all the glass right into his eyes. Well the next day at yeshiva Rabbi Lev wasn't there and it was the same the next day and the next and the next, and we started getting worried maybe he was feeling so bad he wasn't eating or something, so the whole team went to his house but he wasn't there. David our team captain he says well why don't we go to the hospital and take Father Michael some flowers or candy or something and see how he's doing, and then we can write a letter for Rabbi Lev and tell him how things sit when we see him on shabbes, so off home we all went and asked our Ma or Da if we could have a few cents to pool together to buy something nice for Father Michael.

Well Jewish mothers don't do anything by halves and that evening all of us staggered into the hospital carrying babka and donuts and tzimmes and little Judah even had a jar of honey from the bees his Da kept on the roof of their tenement. The nurses in the hospital thought that was the funniest damn thing they'd ever seen, pack of Yid boys in skullcaps loaded down with sweet things and asking where the Irish minister was. Probably it was against all kinds of regulations but they took us up to see Father Michael anyway, and coming up on the room we heard two men laughing fit to bust and that's where we found Rabbi Lev. Father Michael's eyes all bandaged tight and Rabbi Lev holding his hand and the two of them laughing like I'd never heard anybody laugh then or since and all of us in the doorway thinking what in blue hell.

They waved us in and we shared around the food and they told us what happened. Rabbi Lev what he'd done was very politely rode in the ambulance and very politely sat in the waiting room and then very politely sat himself down next to Father Michael's bed and didn't take no for an answer from anybody, and he wasn't going to leave until Father Michael found out whether or not he was going to be able to see. Sleeping in a chair and the nurses sneaking in kosher meals for him. What a mensch. Well it turned out Father Michael and Rabbi Lev both spoke enough French to get by, Father Michael being capital-E Educated and Rabbi Lev being European, and over the last four days they'd become the very best of friends. The hospital folks'd had to give Father Michael a room of his own because him and Rabbi Lev would argue and kvetch and laugh late into the night and nobody could sleep but nobody was brave enough to send Rabbi Lev home. Sadly it turned out Father Michael was pretty much blind in the end but that didn't seem to put the handbrake on them being pals because next thing we knew Father Michael was moving into Rabbi Lev's place so Rabbi Lev could look after him, and when Father Michael got back behind the pulpit they took walks every morning arguing about God before they went off to their respective congregations. Far as I know as of Ma's last letter to me they were still living together in the same drafty little tenement on Ellison Avenue in 1945. I think that's a nice story. Two guys who couldn't be more different figuring out they could be friends anyway. Not understanding maybe but not needing to either.

I wish more folks today were like that.

 

* * *

 

After telling her that story I guess Yulia had Jews on her mind because she asked me today if I'd been to temple yet or if I was too scared to be out in public, and I said I can't because I don't have a passport. I thought maybe she was going to tell me she knew somebody who could make me a fake one and I'd have to tell her how getting caught for me wasn’t the same as for other people, but she didn't. Oh that's okay she said, I know the cantor maybe I could get you in. By know she means he volunteers at the shelter where she gets meals sometimes but she said it like she really meant it and she's a good kid. I'm still scared but these days going to shul really can't be any more dangerous than showing my face in the market if you think about it. I looked it up and Romania got more Jews killed than anywhere else except Germany and after the War most folks who lived went to Israel for pretty obvious reasons. Shul's been tagged with swastikas twice since I got here. I won't be the only one who's scared.

I hope the cantor can get me in even just to see it. Yulia tells me inside it's got the most beautiful ceiling in the whole world and I said it can't be more beautiful than Central Synagogue, but I just looked it up and I found out Central's a copy of a shul just up in Budapest so who knows. Do you want me to ask she said. I can go with you if you want she said. I bet you a bag of apricots it's prettier than Central she said. Deal I said and we shook on it. Pink shul here I come.

 

* * *

 

  
`[text on napkin: GOD FUCKING DAMN IT]`

 

* * *

 

  
  
`[text on receipt: What a surprise Wilson not liking me but you know what I don't like is this fucking car and especially your driving my good God. Lord have mercy Steven if I ever find out who first put you behind a wheel I'm going to cut up their license and eat it in fucking front of them. If you fly like you drive it's no wonder you crashed into the God damn ocean. Fuck. I hate this.]`

 

* * *

 

You remember how we met? Me lifting Becks so she could throw her bread over the side of Williamsburg Bridge and you in your nice church clothes escaping your ma's clutches. You came right up to me and Becks and you said: what're you doing? We're doing tashlikh I said. What's tashlikh you said. It's where we throw away our sins I said. So what's the bread for you said. The fish eat it and then we're good Becks said. Well not exactly I said. Right then your ma finally clapped eyes on you and bustled over and cried Steven ye gombeen you scared the bejesus out of me, and she didn't even blush when my momma started laughing. They got to introducing themselves and you pulled yourself up on the railing since you were littler than Becks then, and you said: can I try? Before I could say I dunno if it's allowed, Becks gave you a big mushy handful of her bread and said yeah! And you helped her throw the rest into the water.

That's what I was thinking about when I found you in my room. Those poor dumb kids and all the shit they had ahead of them and a century later the two of us standing there looking at each other after the War, after everything, after the end of the world. I couldn't decide if I wanted to kiss you or kill you but I was about to launch myself across the room either way. Holding the first notebook open with your thumb like it was a pulp you just couldn't shut. I wanted to die even after you closed it up and put it back. I could feel your fingerprints like it was my skin my bones my heart bruising up blue and purple under your hands. And that's when I saw you were in your uniform and I thought oh God oh Lord oh please I don't want to do this again oh please I wish you'd never found me and now I'll never get away. You dragged me down in '29 when I first caught fire for the sight of your hands and you dragged me down in '43 when you asked me to follow you into the abyss and you dragged me down in '14 into the cold Potomac waters and you'll drag me down here now is what I thought as you opened your mouth and said: you know me?

I sure as shit do, you son of a bitch.

That always has been my problem.

Well I guess I don't know you as well as I thought because you surprised me just now. Putting this fancy jet of yours on autopilot and coming around back to where I was sitting with my hand up my shirt cleaning out the holes His Majesty put in me. You didn't say nothing for a while and I guess you were watching me but I couldn't tell what you were thinking. Nice of you to wait until I got the blood off my hands, anyway. When I'd finished you said: I got something for you Buck. And you started undoing your collar right there in front of me, and just as I was thinking that's an awfully big check you're trying to cash there hotshot and also thinking maybe I was going to have a heart attack, you pulled out this notebook and handed it to me still warm from your body. Well I could not believe it. Where did you find it I said. Sharon gave it to me you said. The woman in Germany I said, the one who tried to kiss you. You nodded. Well damn me for a fool but I said: why did you stop her? She's my niece you said, or that is she would've been my niece if I'd've married Peg. And you tried to smile and sunshine if that wasn't about the saddest thing I've seen since the last time I looked in a mirror I don't know what is.

We were sort of getting to be friends you said, or I thought we were but I guess she thought different and then after the funeral—  Funeral I said, what funeral. Peg's you said. Peggy. She died you said. And I didn't say nothing and I didn't say nothing and then I said: I'm sorry. But what I was really thinking was fuck you for not even telling me you cagey asshole. Mean as hell I know because when did we even have time? Like you were going to drop that casually into the back seat where I was trying to fit too much of me into too small a space and hating that clear back window about as much as I've ever hated anything in my life. But you didn't see any of that happening in my head and I didn't say any of it aloud and I just looked at the notebook.

You read it I said, and you said: no Buck I promise I didn't. And I hoped to God I could still tell when you were lying. You sounded sincere. I'm pretty sure you didn't. I guess you wouldn't have been so nice to me if you had.

Well fuck this jet and fuck this mission and fuck you every which way for dragging me into it because I know I could have gotten away without you slowing me down and I know what's in those lockers in the hold. Oh fuck I don't want to pick up a gun again I don't want it in my hands I don't want to touch it or smell it or look upon it God almighty why did it have to go this way. My insides writhing like they want out. A long long time ago there was a punishment for killing your own father and it was called the penalty of the sack and what they did was they sewed you up in a leather bag with a rooster and a dog and a monkey and a snake and tossed you in a river. Even odds whether you'd suffocate or get clawed to pieces before you drowned and that's what it feels like inside me right now. Hours I have to sit here knowing what my hands are going to have to do. I'd cut them off to spite you if it didn't mean leaving you alone. In the meantime look at you. Look at you. An hour ago you were fighting your friends for my sake and now here you are. Serene as a lake and when the hell did you manage to learn that. Huh? Who taught you to lay your anger down? Who taught you be quiet? You're going to put a gun in my hand and you're not going to say a word. You used to hate guns, you said they were a lazy man's weapon and barbaric besides and look at you now. What happened? I can't tell myself it's in service to humanity like you can, sweetheart. I'm selfish. I can't tell myself those lies. They're not lies to the world but they are to me. Oh god I don't want to do this. Oh God.

 

* * *

 

shetolichenu l'shalom shetatz'idenu l'shalom

shetolichenu l'shalom shetatz'idenu l'shalom

shetolichenu l'shalom shetatz'idenu l'shalom

shetolichenu l'shalom shetatz'idenu l'shalom

shetolichenu l'shalom shetatz'idenu l'shalom

sh

 

* * *

 

Here we God damn well fucking go.


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

I expected him to be bigger. Maybe it's just because all the times I saw him or someone like him I was sitting down trapped and he was towering over me or looking down at me through a window, or shit maybe just metaphorically given the power he had over me, but trussed up in His Majesty's spaceship I realized the Sokovian was only a little guy with a lumpy face who looked about as awful as I felt. Not so tough without your wee red notebook are you son is what I thought but he looked so tired and scared I almost felt bad having that in my head. I say almost because mostly what was taking up real estate between my ears was how much my face and my belly and my ribs hurt and how what was left of my arm hurt and didn't at the same time. Static snap snap snap like it was still there and a ghost and biting at my neck. And draped over you like I was I could feel how tense you were coming up that hill and clapping eyes on the little Sokovian and the Panther, but I could tell His Majesty didn't want to hurt me no more. Kitty's pretty claws sheathed and his mask under his arm. It's okay I said or tried to but I don't know if you understood me because mostly what came out was blood. I guess I lost some time because the next thing I knew I was flat on my back looking at the sky.

Well I tried to lift my head up but His Majesty put his hand on my good shoulder and said be at ease Sergeant Barnes. Captain Rogers is bringing the jet nearer he said. I'm sorry I said. What I meant was I was sorry for what happened to him and his father and the fighting and the whole damn stupid mess but he shook his head. It is I who should apologize he said. I allowed my anger to trample my reason he said; I know you did not kill my father. I killed his father though I said. Stark is what I meant and His Majesty looked somewhere that wasn't me and I guess that was the bunker, because he was quiet for a while. Yes he said, you did. But that does not mean you deserve to die as well.

Damn straight I said and he laughed, and I tried to laugh too and just ended up coughing a bunch of blood onto his cat suit.

You appeared then looking like you'd been sucking lemons for fun instead of moving the jet which is how I worked out how bad I looked, and without so much as a by your leave you picked me up like I was a swoony damsel. I thought for a second about fighting but I was just so powerful tired and I know how dumb it sounds but you smelled like home. Blood and dirt and unwashed you where your hair fuzzed out soft at the nape of your neck, over me it came in a wave and oh Lord but a man's only so strong. I don't care to admit it now but I closed my eyes and I did not give one good God damn what anybody thought of me then with my face mashed against your collar breathing deep. I'll murder him later is what I thought and I let go all the muscles I'd been clenching probably since I stepped off that boat in Singapore. Since I hit the water in DC. Since 1945 and falling fast. Since the shells of '43. Since '41 and greetings James Buchanan Barnes you are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United Fucking States. I miss my Ma is what I thought then and I put my hand over my eyes. It's okay Buck it's gonna be all right you said. I said: sure. And that's the last thing I remember until waking up on this bunk.

It was nice of you to leave my notebook and wrap up my stump a little although I guess that second one was more for safety, sparking away like it was. Still not-quite-hurts like a son of a bitch and maybe the worst part is how I can feel air where I couldn't feel air before, cold on my insides like I'm open for surgery and someone's breathing into the hole. I guess so I could feel things the way I did, they would've had to wire it into my spine or my brain and fuck that's not a thought I wanted to have right now a million miles from medical anything. I don't know where we're going or how long we're going to be up here. Maybe forever. I don't know where two fugitives like us can land anywhere in the world and hell if I myself land anywhere I'll probably be classified as a WMD on the spot. Can this freaky jet of yours break the atmosphere? I wouldn't be surprised. How do you feel about starting a kibbutz on the moon, sweetheart? Just you and me? Your friends could come and visit in the spring when the craters are in bloom.

Fuck. Ignore me. I think this thing's leeching heavy metals into my bloodstream.

By all rights I should sleep but I can't stop seeing what happened down there. There we are in that bunker and there I am reading my lines but what it felt like was I was watching myself on a stage from way way back in the wings. Part of me knew what would going to happen as soon as I saw them dead Soldiers because the Sokovian wouldn't have brought us all the way out there just for a bunch of empty fish tanks and his Dr. Death monologue. Those tanks were a sorrowful thing. Please believe me I was mighty relieved to not have to fight them to not have to kill any more but in a way they were the only blood relations I had left in this world and it could've been me in there just as easy. Luck of the draw. I can't help thinking if we'd just got there sooner I could have brought them out of the cold, into the light, into that watery sun and put my hands on their faces and melted the ice in them, showed them how to be people like I became people. It wasn't their fault. Like fighting dogs they were beaten into that shape and like fighting dogs they're not to blame. I wish they hadn't died. I wish I could have saved them. Just a few more lives not snuffed out oh Lord I am so God damn tired of all this death.

Point is I knew I wasn't walking out of there whole. And then what I was thinking when I was on the floor was poor Stark. That poor poor man. I felt awfuler than dirt and still do. The look on his face when he saw that tape Lord have mercy no one should ever have to look at anything like he looked then. All I wanted to do when we fought was shut him off so I could run and not stop but when I went down I thought you were going to kill him. I thought I was going to have to drag myself across the floor and pull you off him like it was 1936 all over again. If I'd had a gun I would've shot you both probably just to make you quit. He's your friend I thought he's your friend. Stop for fuck's sake stop. He's your friend. Thank God you did because I frankly don't know if I could have managed it. And sweetheart I guarantee you would've regretted that for the rest of your life.

I can hear you moving around up there so I'll quit torturing this pen. I guess you can hear as good as me so you know I'm awake but I'll lay back down and we can pretend I was sleeping anyway. And if you want to come back here and look at me a little longer well that's fine too.

 

* * *

 

Oh God.

Coming in to land.

Now listen here you braindead motherfucker even if you forget everything else in your God damned shitshow of a life you better fucking well remember this.

Baruch Hashem.

 

* * *

 

So much for that kibbutz. Being a freak of nature and a traitor to your country gets you a hut and a cranky landlady out here in Wakanda. You meaning me. You, Steven Rogers, you've already left in your superjet to shake down a floating prison on your own without so much as a goodbye, probably on account of you knowing exactly how much I'm going to yell at you when you get your ass back on solid ground. See if I share my hut. You can sleep out back with the God damn goats.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

First thing they did when the hatch opened was get me on a floating stretcher like something out of Jules Verne despite how I said I could walk, which was probably for the best because even laying there I was looking around with my mouth open like a schmuck gawping at the buildings and the people and the things I keep thinking of as spaceships and probably aren't. Earthships maybe. They look like they're made out of stone and they're deadly beautiful like fish that live way down deep in the sea and Lord I could watch them forever I think and not be bored. Somewhere some people were singing and playing music and I couldn't make out the words but I could hear the beat of drums thumping slow and for a second I forgot to be scared. Then we started going underground and my heart went double-time, because all I could smell was wet stone and salt and metal and my brain didn't know whether it was freaking out about the War or freaking out about the cells in Russia or freaking out about the freak, not until I saw bits of what I could only assume was lab equipment and it decided on that last one. I hadn't even noticed you were there until you said hey easy Buck with your hand squeezing my shoulder, and a girl who couldn't have been any older than Becks was when I got drafted took one look at me and snapped her fingers at a bunch of people in white and said oxygen! and then she unwrapped all the gauze around my arm and started swearing like a sailor. And that helped more than the oxygen frankly.

What the fuck she said, what the fuck what the fuck, and then His Majesty got there and she kept saying it except she was saying it in their language. This is barbaric she said, I can't believe what I'm seeing Bast preserve us I think this goes into his heart. Well what did you expect His Majesty said. I can understand you I said and they looked at me shocked. You were looking at me shocked too because I guess you'd never heard me say anything that wasn't English or Yiddish. Sorry I said, but if you don't want me to hear then you better pick something else. You speak isiXhosa she said real slow. I guess so I said. How many languages do you speak she said. I don't know I said.

Okay she said. Okay.

I was probably the only person in the room not surprised when I burned through all them painkillers they gave me right away, even the ones made for things like us. It's fine I said, go on. The girl told me then what she was going to do and how much it was probably going to hurt and she said she could try to put me under if I wanted, but I didn't. After a little while I was nearly wishing I'd said yes because the pain and the heat and the pulsing noisy wrongness of it was about as much as I could take, and you next to me coiling up tighter and tighter and not saying nothing and winding me up even more. Thank God for His Majesty because he saw that disaster waiting to happen and he took you off a little ways to show you something. Well the girl she looked as relieved as I felt and she said hey there doing good and by the way I'm Shuri. James I said, or Bucky if you want. I know who you are Sergeant Barnes she said, I read a book about you. Crawling in my skin and gritting my teeth and only half from the pain I said: yeah? was it any good? So-so she said; it was in English. I don't know why but that made me laugh and the agony backed off a little. She said: Gabriel Jones the man who wrote it he said you were always telling stories. Jonesy I said, Jonesy wrote a book about me? Then I said: that's true enough. Okay she said, so tell me a story.

Well that was blatantly a way to get me to not think about what she and her pretty assistant were doing digging around in my shoulder and welding something inside me from the smell of it, but at that point I sure didn't care. Blood and pus I could smell too by then and if I was talking it meant less chance I was going to throw up. Sure I said, okay. So I told her all the stories I could remember without my momma there to back me up. I told her about Rabbi Akiva and I told her about Rabbi Elizer and I told her about Rabbi Yonatan and even the Fairy Rabbi of Ergetz, and when I ran out of rebbe stories I told her about Honi and Elijah and Noah and Joseph and then finally when my voice was sounding like something scraped off the bottom of a tank tread I got to Becks's favorite which was Moses and Miriam. I told her about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and when I got to the part about the waters Shuri said: this is like Ironside! What the hell is Ironside I said. So Shuri told me the story and it goes like this.

Once a long time ago there was a woman who brought her little daughter with her on her back while she was working the land, and when her daughter got heavy she would put her down under a tree to sleep and kept working. What happened that day was an eagle swooped down and grabbed the little girl and flew away, and her momma tried to chase it but she couldn't keep up. The woman was so sad and angry she said: I will not die before I see my daughter again.

Well meanwhile the girl was struggling and struggling and the eagle lost its grip and dropped her into a field in the land of the cannibals who only had one leg each. (Were there cannibals who had two legs I asked Shuri and she told me to shut up.) The cannibals took one look at the girl with her two fine legs and decided they would bring her back home with them to look at and seeing that she could run and dance and hunt better than any of them the king of the cannibals decided he was going to marry her when she was grown up. When she grew up he did marry her and they had heaps of children but all of them had two legs, and when her children grew up and married some of the cannibals all their children had two legs too, and the people who didn't got jealouser and jealouser, and the one-legged people started talking about how maybe if they ate the two-legged people they'd get two legs that way, and the girl who was now a woman got real scared. She got so scared that her momma had a dream about how scared she was, and her momma woke up and said: my daughter is alive and I'm going to have a son who'll rescue her.

Her momma being like a hundred years old now everyone thought that was a laugh and a half, but after the normal course of things she did have a son and people stopped laughing because that son wasn't quite human. He grew up ten years in ten days, and only half of him was flesh like normal folk and his other half was made of metal and so I guess being a literal people they called him Ironside. His momma told him all about his sister, and Ironside being good and brave and maybe a little stupid set out right then and there to go save her. He walked and walked and walked and he came to a river so deep and wide he couldn't cross it, and so he hit the river with his metal hand and said: I have no sister, Cousin River, let me pass! and the river split in two. Past the river was the cannibal village and Ironside snuck into the king's hut and there was his sister and her children and her children's children all hiding from the cannibals. I am your brother and I've come to save you! Ironside said and he took all of them and they ran. The cannibals chased them but because they only had one leg they were too slow, and Ironside got to the river with the two-legged folks first and he struck the riverbed and said: I have my sister, Cousin River, fill your banks! and when the cannibals tried to cross they all drowned. And Ironside and his sister and all her people went home.

Well I was going to tell Shuri thanks and as how I thought that was a pretty neat story, but something happened in my arm then worse than anything I'd felt since maybe I lost it the first time, and I guess I screamed because the next thing I knew you were holding me down and sunshine I just about broke both your fucking elbows purely out of reflex. I'm glad you did it though because I was writhing something awful and at the very least I remember knocking over a tray full of tools with a crash like the end of the world, and if you hadn't been there I might've hurt someone. My whole left side dipped in lava for what felt like an hour but it was probably only a minute or two before they got in there and shut off whatever was playing my spine like a piano. Sweating and crying and I must've done something bad in my mouth because I could taste blood; it's a good thing I lost any dignity I ever had decades ago. You were still holding me down like you'd forgotten to let go so I turned my head and pressed my forehead against the soft inside of your wrist and for a while I just breathed. I stayed like that while they finished and got me wrapped up and I didn't move until Shuri said: this will need surgery I'm sorry Sergeant Barnes but it will be all right for now, and I turned my head and said sweetheart this is the nicest I been treated in seventy years you got nothing to be sorry about.

This hut they stuck me in once I proved I could stand on my own two feet is a real nice place. Sort of in the middle of nowhere which is nice because if I wake up shouting the only person I'm going to piss off is Mowayndu my landlady and I really don't think her impression of me can get any worse. On one side of us is the river and on the other side of us the forest and when you get through the forest it's a ten minute walk to the panther tower in the city. Shuri said the guards know my face now and I can go into the royal gardens whenever I want to. She probably didn't mean in the middle of the night but seeing as how I can't sleep for worrying, even with the river chuckling slow and the breath of the wind out in the forest and how God damn tired I am, I'm going to take myself on up there and wait for you to get back from that prison. Pretend I'm not waiting for you is more what I mean and then I'm going to yell at you. Somebody ought to.

 

* * *

 

It's a good thing I went to the garden when I did because I don't think it was very long at all before I looked up and saw that jet landing. Maybe longer though because it turns out there's a garden here a person's meant to be in at night and it is something else entirely and I think I could've lost a whole week there and hardly noticed. Well being all the way at the bottom like I was, it was a hell of a run to get to the top, and Shuri or somebody briefed those guards but good because as I ran up the ones ahead of me would point left or right and laugh and say that way colonizer! that way white boy! and without them I'd've lost myself for sure. I got there just in time to see you going down a hall with the Maximoff kid helping her walk, and I turned and looked and who came down the ramp right next to me then but Wilson looking like death warmed over twice.

Oh hell Wilson is what I said like we were old friends, and not even thinking I reached out and turned his face and then I winced, half because of touching him without asking and half because of the state of him. It could've happened in the fight but I think I know a beating when I see one. Wilson looked at me funny and then he said you oughta see the other guy. And I said I hope he's a smear on a wall somewhere, and Wilson said: something like that. And when he grinned there was still blood in his teeth. Oy gevult I said with feeling and Wilson's eyebrows just about hit the roof. He said hey man you Jewish? Yeah I said. Me too he said. Coming up behind me and scaring the life out of me you said: Sam you never told me that! Sure, Wilson said, my daddy's folks go back a long ways hey maybe you knew them. No shit I said, where you from? Harlem he said.

Well God damn but I sure did, I remember the black Harlem Jews and a nicer bunch of people you never could meet if you lived to be a hundred. Holy shit is what I said. You said: yeah hey Buck we knew a lot of them maybe we knew your grandpa Sam. I probably kissed his grandpa I said and you said: Bucky! And Wilson laughed and boy was that a great sound to hear right then. That kid Maximoff is she okay I said. I think so you said, she's a tough cookie. Good I said and started shouting.

I started off in English for Wilson's benefit and then I switched to Yiddish for my benefit and then isiXhosa for everyone else's benefit and by the time I was done probably everybody in the palace but you knew exactly how bad I had it for you but I did not give one good God damn. I think I took you to task for every single stupid-ass thing you'd done since 1943 and when I ran out of those I went all the way back to '26 and the time you put your wee fists up because some big-mouthed mick was heckling Mr. Perlmann the greengrocer for closing on Saturdays. A fucking prison I said when I ran out of breath, and you didn't even fucking take your God damn comm. I broke mine in the fight you said and I said well shit it's not like you coulda asked the whiz kid in the God damn basement! You done? you said and I thought about yelling some more but you were turning pink and my throat hurt so I said yeah I'm done. No c'mon Wilson said, call him a martyr again that was my favorite part. I can't I said, he thinks that's a compliment. And for a second you looked so happy I felt scared unto death. No I thought, take it back, stop it, you can't be happy now or it'll hurt more when everything gets taken away oh please sweetheart please. And when I caught myself thinking that I felt so sick I almost fell down right there on the floor and died. I guess that's the moment when I decided what I was going to do and it must've shown on my face, because you said hey Buck you okay?

Fucking just come here is what I said and got my arms around you for the first time in I don't even like to think about how long. You hugged me so hard I thought you were trying to crack my back and I actually felt it, and even when a dumb hurt noise came out of me you didn't let up. I could feel you breathing right there against where I was breathing and that made all my insides curl up like I was on fire. I'm sorry Buck you said real quiet. Fuck you don't say that I said. You don't even know what you're apologizing for I said. I'm sorry for your arm you said, and for chasing you and wrecking your apartment and getting you arrested and and not finding you sooner and not helping you and not grabbing your hand and—   Okay champ I said. Okay.

Uh guys the king's here Wilson said, maybe leave some room for Moses. Well it turned out it was just you His Majesty wanted, so I turned to Wilson and I said: you need medical treatment? Hell no Wilson said. I said: do you think you can sleep? That's a stupid question he said. Okay I said, you want to see the night garden? Well I could tell he wanted to ask about my arm and what was going on and what was going to happen next but I also could see him maybe start deciding that I was a stupid person to ask, and then when I started taking him down the tower he just guppied around at the walls and the art and the lady guards like a little kid, and that was a nice thing to see, so in the end I didn't say nothing either. In the garden I showed him all the luminescent flowers and the pitcher plants that looked like deep sea fish and the little glowworms hiding under the leaves, and the light-posts that Namari at the gate told me earlier were lit by bio-gas; folks get buried special in the garden and as they decompose it fuels the lamps. Nothing at all gets wasted here not even people. I guess that sounds like a metaphor but it's just the truth. When we got around to the gates Namari leaned on her spear and said molo, umlungu, back so soon? Is this your boyfriend? What did she say Wilson said. She asked if you were my boyfriend I said. He'd be so lucky Wilson said, how do I tell her that, and Namari winked and goosed him as we passed. Wilson yelped but he also looked real pleased.

When we'd moved on some Wilson said damn I should've told her you were taken by the other giant white guy that would've been funnier. I said: what? And Wilson said: what? Steve's not a fruit I said, he doesn't. And then I shut my damn fool mouth. Oh Wilson said, is that how it is. Man you're an idiot. I know I said. No I mean you're an idiot Wilson said, he loves you dude he'd do anything for you—   Yeah, I said. That's kind of the problem.

You say bug I say feature Wilson said. Come on man let's go see if Steve's done with T'Challa and hey by the time we get all the way up there it'll probably be dawn. I dunno about you but I'm starving.

Well we didn't find you but when we got up to the very very top of the tower Wilson was right; the sun was just about to crest the horizon and the sky was pink and gold and streaked with clouds and oh the view. I guess being the royal tower it was taller than the rest of the buildings and down below we could see the crazy-quilt sprawl of the city just waking up and everything beyond. Probably we were only seeing a little bitty corner of it but it seemed to me like we could see the whole country all around us in every direction rolling away and away and on and on forever. Wow Wilson said. Yeah I said. Wow. And we just stared at all of that green nothing for a while.

Then Wilson said hey do you remember the modeh ani. Fuck you do I remember the modeh ani I said, what do I look like, a goy? Of course I remember the modeh ani. You got no idea do you Wilson said. I got no fucking clue I said, but start me off and I'll pick it up. I dunno if I remember the modeh ani Wilson said. Oh well that's just great I said, why'd you suggest it then hotshot. And Wilson said: seems like a good day to be thankful.

Amen brother I said. A-fucking-men.

We managed in the end.

 

* * *

 

I'm not here in Wakanda to rest on my laurels I learned today. Mowayndu wants me to work and thank God for that. What kind of work I said late this morning when she came in and clapped her hands next to my ear and shouted wake up umlungu! Animals comma looking after she said. What kind of animals I said not really awake; I'd only slept maybe three hours after Wilson wandered off for his second breakfast. Goats mostly she said. Goats! That was a fine thing to hear because if I knew anything after Mongolia it was chasing goats and I felt mighty relieved that I wasn't going to make a complete fool of myself in front of a scary old Wakandan woman.

Well first of all I was under the mistaken impression that a goat is a goat is a goat. It's small and furry and has not so much a bad attitude as a lot of bad ideas and no impulse control. Goats in Wakanda I learned today are not the same as goats in Mongolia. Mongolian goats are like small shaggy dogs but Wakandan goats are tall and sleek as cheetahs and the noise they make is I guess what the end of the world might sound like if you were a duck, this flat awful honk I'm going to hear in my nightmares for the rest of my unnatural life. They're huge and dignified and the only thing they got in common with Mongolian goats is that they are stupid as all hell. The alpha doe in particular has a habit of putting her head through the fence and then getting stuck because of her horns and her not having spatial awareness or thumbs she can't fix the problem, and then of course she just stands there screaming. Mowayndu'd tried to jury-rig the fence so she couldn't but the alpha doe being the alpha doe it didn't do much good. I got your number sunshine I told her grimly and when Mowayndu wasn't looking I tied a big stick across that doe's horns so she couldn't get her head through the fence no more. When Mowayndu saw it she looked at me and she looked at the goat and back at me and then she grunted like: you'll do I guess. That was about all the good grace I got before she introduced me to the other animals.

Which were rhinos, for the record.

Thing about a rhino is it looks like a creature that shouldn't exist no more, like something that was lumbering around when Man was still living in caves and eating his meat raw and hadn't invented pants yet. That's what first went through my mind when I saw it and for a few seconds just could not believe what was in front my eyes, and then the second thing I thought was: Behemoth. I know there's land animals bigger and sea animals plenty bigger but I felt awful tiny standing there with it looking at me through the flimsy little nothing of a fence between us. If it had wanted out then by God it was going. The goats had a better fence for fucksakes. And little old Mowayndu she climbs over those twigs like they're nothing and the rhino's nothing and she says come on boy get in here. Well what is a man to do under those circumstances I ask you. When a grandmother gives you a look like that and tells you to climb over a fence to meet a rhino then you climb over that God damn fence. Mowayndu had her hand on the rhino's side so before I could convince myself it was a dumb idea I got my hand on its side too, and then I said oh. I want to compare it to something else but it wasn't like anything else at all, it was only like touching a rhino. It was warm. Standing in that hot sun for hours grazing away of course it was warm, but the feeling caught me like a fishhook under the ribs and tugged me forward and I put my cheek against its skin. Its huge huge heart beating and I thought of Lithuania and the forest and the dead train. What I'd wanted to feel when I laid down there and listened. When I opened my eyes and looked at Mowayndu she looked a little less like she wanted to put my head in the river. What do we do now I said. It's bath day she said, we're taking them to the lake. Okay I said, but wait what do you mean by take them.

So I rode a rhinoceros today is what I'm saying.

That was almost worth getting my arm blown off if I'm honest and I wish you were here so I could've told you about it. I guess you know now but that's not really the point.

Where the hell are you, sunshine?

 

 

* * *

 

I was surprised this morning when I got up just after dawn and Mowayndu was already out with the goats. Aren't you going to the coronation I said. It's very long and very boring she said, unless it's not in which case I don't need to see entrails before noon. The fuck kind of coronations do you have here I said. There hasn't been a challenger in three hundred years she said, I am joking. But I kind of thought maybe she wasn't. Well noon came up scorching and I started getting wobbly because I wasn't used to it, so Mowayndu told me to get lost because she wasn't going to hold my hair back if I got heat stroke and started throwing up. Namari wasn't at the gate but I guess she told her friend because the new guard said the Americans were all in the market.

I thought I'd find you there but it was everyone else instead, Wilson and Maximoff and the two whose names I couldn't remember at first, but we had a good old round-robin introduction with everybody giving me the hairy eyeball but Wilson. How's the arm man Wilson said and I said it's okay, and they relaxed after that like Wilson was their barometer. Barton and Lang looked as rough as Wilson but Maximoff not having a mark on her looked almost worse. Well Becks never had a thing as bad as prison happen to her thank God but let it not be said I can't get a girl to smile on my worst day. As we wandered the market I dropped into my queer skin and made my walk gentle, and I flirted with Barton who I think cottoned on right away to what I was doing and flirted back real nice, and finally I held up these huge beaded earrings against my jaw and looked at her and said: not my color? and she laughed sweet as anything. My bubbe would've loved this I said in Sokovian. My bubbe would have set it on fire she said. Then she said: you're not—   No I said, I'm a mutt but I'm not that. They have no shuls here she said. Well they wouldn't I said, closed borders. I just wanted to hear kaddish she said; my brother's first yahrzeit was last month. Oh sweetheart I said, I'm so sorry.

It's funny she said, I used to hate it when I was a little girl. Kaddish. But my mother said to me once that the blind are required to bless the moon. The blind! Even though seeing the moon is what you bless. She told me that's what kaddish is for. You bless what's wonderful even though you can't see it.

Yeah I said. Ain't that the truth.

You know she said, I think I'll buy these after all, they're just my color. And she put them in her ears after and shook out her hair, and she looked as human then as folks like us ever do, which is to say not a lot. But she looked better. And fiercely I thought: good. Good.

 

* * *

 

Some commotion going on up at the palace. Mowayndu doesn't know what's going on and the river-guards telling us to stay inside. I don't like it. Animals restless too.

I better not find you in the middle of this.

 

* * *

 

Battle out there on the plains. I can see it but only just if I climb on top of Mowayndu's hut. River-guards say someone contested the throne and everything's going to be fine but I heard someone else say the king's dead. Fuck. If His Majesty's dead then what the fuck happens next.

Mowayndu's daughter and her daughter's husband and their three boys came over when it started. Nobody wants to be alone with the sounds coming off the plains. The boys are scared of me and I don't blame them. Mowayndu has a huge vibranium spear for killing lions with I guess and I took it and I'm staying out here until I know for sure it's safe.

I feel lower than dirt but the first thought I had when the river-guards said civil war was oh thank God it's not somebody here for me.

Fuck.

 

* * *

 

T'Challa's alive thank God thank God. Some people dead in the fighting but not him or his family. Wilson and Maximoff and Barton and Lang all fine but you still nowhere to be seen and nobody seems to know exactly where you are. I think he's on a mission of some kind Shuri said. Fucking great. A mission. When were you going to tell me you awful motherfucker. If you get yourself killed I'm finding you and hauling you out of your grave so I can kill you my own self.

Well since you weren't there to stop me I told Shuri my plans and she said they were good. She said her people would come up with the programs and she'd have everything ready. But don't you think Captain Rogers is going to be angry she said. Oh don't worry I said. That's the great thing about him I said. You can always count on Steve to get mad.

 

* * *

 

Walked out with Mowayndu this evening. Her family's still here. I guess she noticed how pent up I was because when we got out to the forest where the kids and their friends from the village were playing she said: you need to punch a tree or something go ahead. I'm not punching a tree I said, what'd that poor tree do to deserve it. So we just walked. Out in the woods the children playing. We walked back and forth along the treeline until my muscles uncoiled and I could breathe a little and I didn't feel so much like I was being strangled, listening to the children out there singing: my mother, my apple, my fruit, the sun's going down, my mother, the sun! And I breathed.

This is what I did when I was in labor Mowayndu said. The midwives told me to walk so I walked. I think I must have walked four miles before she came. I am surprised there's not still a groove.

That's what they told my mother too I said. She did it with me and she was going to do it with Becks but she came too quick.

Your mother Mowayndu said, she is American?

Was I said. No she—   And I laughed. Well she wasn't really from anywhere I said. The country's not there any more. So yeah I guess so. I guess she was American in the end.

We aren't anything in the end Mowayndu said. Death makes of us one people.

Baruch hatov vehametiv I said. What I meant was thank fuck for that. But I was thinking of the cobblestones in Ivano-Frankivsk, all the same.

It's after dark now and quiet. I can hear the river and the night insects and the boys breathing in their sleep. I thought they were scared of me but they asked to stay in here tonight instead of with their grandma and they asked me for a bedtime story too. Well I'm ashamed to say it took me a long time to think of one that had a happy ending and in the end I told them about Joseph, how his brothers got jealous of how good he was treated and sold him off as a slave, and how Joseph worked his way up the ladder and interpreted Pharaoh's dreams, and how he tested his brothers and forgave them. The oldest boy said: but why'd Joseph forgive them if what they'd done was so terrible. And I said my people we believe someone's repented if they get faced with the same situation again and don't do the bad thing they did the first time. See Joseph's brothers could've made Benjamin their scapegoat but they didn't and Judah offered his own self up instead, and Joseph saw that and he knew they were sorry. If someone's really and truly sorry you got to forgive them or else it turns into a grudge and that eats up your soul. That was a good story the littlest one said and then they all whispered for a while where they thought I couldn't hear them.

So I'm thinking about it now, I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear. Repentance I mean. How having those words inside me means I'm broken. Got to thinking of myself as empty but full's what I really am, full of all the things they planted in me and left to rot, and what it means is I can't ever repent. Not really. Not until I get those things out of me and I can hear the words again and not go on and murder people like a God damn robot somebody winds up and points.

I guess what I really am is the Golem.

Rabbi Lev used to tell the story the way everybody knew it, how Rabbi Loew made a man out of clay to protect Prague from antisemites and how later it went crazy and he had to put it down, and Rabbi Lev being from Prague himself that made sense and all, but Ma told it a different way and it goes like this. The prophet Jeremiah and his son are studying the Sefer Yetzirah and they study and study and three years go by, and they're trying all kinds of experiments during all that time and finally something amazing happens. Suddenly in front of them is a man and on his forehead is written EMET and in his hand is a knife. Well before they can say anything the man reaches up and carves the E off his forehead so it only says MET and that means death. Jeremiah is very upset and he asks the man why he would do such a thing to himself and the man says: if anyone creates a person then people are going to say there are two gods in the world. And Jeremiah says: what do you want me to do? And the man says: do what you did to make me but backwards, and Jeremiah does. And the man turns to dust in front of them.

Well me they put the shem on my head and they said shoot this kill him protect this world we're making, and I did because that's what I was made to do, but they never carved that shem out before I got loose and here I am still raging. Crushing things with my big ugly hands. Well no more. Knife's in my hand now and my hand belongs to me. I'll carve out everything they put in me or turn to dust trying. No more weapons. No more soldiers.

No fucking more.

 

* * *

 

You finally showed up this afternoon covered in dirt and ashes and good Lord the bruises on your face. So I guess the truck won is what I wanted to say but I was so angry it wouldn't come out. Mowayndu gave you this look like I was her firstborn daughter and you'd come courting drunk with your shirt untucked. I think if I hadn't grabbed your collar and hauled you down to the river she probably would've figured out a way to pick you up and throw you in the rhino pen. Well I made you sit down on a rock and I untied my shuka and dipped it in the river and when I was halfway through scrubbing your damn face off you finally said Buck I'm sorry. Oh? I said, what're you apologizing for this time. T'Challa's people thought they found a HYDRA base in Mali you said, he asked if I wanted to go up there and check it out.

I didn't say nothing.

It took longer than we expected you said. But it went really well. Boy those Dora Milaje ladies sure are good at what they do I wish we'd had ten of 'em during the War.

I didn't say nothing.

It was okay Buck you said, I wore a mask, and I said: oh that's great you wore a mask it's all fine then! And you shut up for a minute.

I guess I thought it'd be easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, you said. And to your credit you looked a little contrite.

I hate this I said. You exhaust me I said. I turn around and you're off busting heads. I got to watch myself like a hawk because heaven help me if I get a papercut you'll disappear and turn up a month later short-sheeting the Senate. Can't you just stay out of fucking trouble for one fucking minute.

I'm sorry you said. I'll try harder.

I kept scrubbing away for a while and then I gave it up for a bad job and I said: actually I'm glad you weren't here because some shit went down and you being around would've made things go nuclear. Did they get you up to speed?

Not really you said. And you asked real sweet: tell me?

Sunshine you should be thanking God I'm such a sucker for that face.

 

* * *

 

Is that your boyfriend? Mowayndu asked when I came back.

He'd be so lucky I said.

 

* * *

 

Shuri says the chamber's done and the programs are coming along. Lots of brain scans. God almighty if there's anything I enjoy less than sticking my head in a tube I haven't met it yet, but Shuri being a doll she figured out a way to look at my brain without shoving it into a magnet for twenty minutes. Probably she sat down for an hour and invented the imaging equivalent of curing cancer just for me but I get the impression she does that a lot. His Majesty stops by sometimes and sort of gargles at her.

I think if I keep disappearing like this Mowayndu's going to come up here and give Shuri what-for and haul me back by the ear. Boy she's going to be even less happy about this than you. I wonder if I can bribe His Majesty into breaking the news for me. Kings aren't supposed to be scared of their subjects, right?

 

* * *

 

I swear to God I'm going to kill this goat.

 

* * *

 

Ten days to go and this afternoon I finally hitched up my God damn panties and went to find Wilson. I wasn't really planning on telling Maximoff on account of we'd only talked the once but as luck would have it they were together in the queen mother's garden, which isn't who it belongs to so much as what folks call it because all the flowers are white. Wilson was sitting reading a book under a bush with leaves as big as him and Maximoff was nearby in the sun wearing this enormous yellow floppy hat and she was using her powers on the fallen petals to make a design like I've seen pictures of Buddhist monks doing with sand. I stopped a ways off because I didn't want to startle her and make her mess up, but without even looking she said Sergeant Barnes hello! Hi I said and coming closer I said: I like it. It was like a flower and a magen david all at once and it reminded me of the designs on Ma's ketubah. Call me Bucky I said, Sergeant makes me feel old. You smell old Wilson said as I sat down next to him. That's goat I said. The hell's a Vinegar Hill boy doing hanging around goats Wilson said, I'm ashamed of you right now. I rode a rhino the other day I said. And Wilson said well c'mon that's just unfair.

I didn't want to beat around the bush any so I told them what was going on and then I said I haven't told Steve yet.

Hey that's fantastic Wilson said.

Uh I said, thanks?

Naw man fantastic for me Wilson said. I can't wait. Because he's gonna freak. And I'm gonna be there. And his face is gonna go all red, and he's gonna tear you a new—

Come on I said. What happened to he loves you man he'd do anything for you what happened to that.

He lost you twice and it was a gongshow Wilson said. But hey you never know maybe third time's the charm. When are you going to tell him. Where even is he right now.

I think he's fighting with T'Challa I said. Sparring I mean. Training. Whatever. He's avoiding me. My landlady scares him.

Bring him here when you tell him Maximoff said. This is a quiet place. It will help.

Won't be quiet once Steve gets up here Wilson said, I can tell you that for a fact. You sure about this?

Hell no I said. But it's the best chance I got.

After that we talked about other things, about Wilson getting a secure line set up so he can talk to his mom and his sister and about Maximoff having sessions with a priest of Bast who's teaching her finer control with her mind powers, and how the other day both of them saw two of the lady guards getting married on a terrace all strewn with beaded sashes, and when the red shawls came off the brides' heads a dozen children jumped up and released little birds from their hands. Barton's gone home Maximoff told me, or not home exactly but to his family at least, and Lang doesn't know what he's doing but Wilson said that's not unusual. It seems like everybody's okay or at least the folks here are. I thought about Stark and wondered what he was doing. Was he all right. Was he looking for us. Did he still want to kill me or did he change his mind. I guess it doesn't matter but I couldn't help wondering anyway and thinking about his face, that pain. If that's ever a thing you can get better from and how I hoped so because if not then what did that mean for me?

We'll walk you back Wilson said when it started getting dark. I want to meet this scary grandma of yours.

You just want to meet the rhinos I said.

Yup that's it Wilson said, I'm just using you for your rhinos. You mad?

Not even a little I said.

 

* * *

 

Maximoff was right about how nice that garden is. I've been coming here in the evenings for days now. I went there the day after and the day after that and tucked away in a corner I found a little fishpond where the water was so clear they must clean it all the time, or maybe they have some kind of special filter hidden down in the rocks. The fish aren't really like koi at all which I expected but more like catfish and they're real pretty. Brown and black and gold and as big as both of my feet end-to-end and they have faces like thoughtful whiskery old men. They keep bobbing to the surface when I'm here so I guess somebody comes and feeds them.

Mostly what I've been doing here is trying to come up with what I'm going to say to you. Wilson's bugging me to just come out and tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth and I said how much and he gave me this look like son I'm not angry I'm disappointed and he said everything. But I don't know if I can do that. I guess in a way I am though and hell you reading this now you already know. That's a strange thought. In a way I'm not talking to you now but your future self and I don't know him yet. I don't know how the you in the future is going to take all of this and I'm sorry. I know I've hurt you. If I had more time and if I was smarter I would've rewritten this whole damn thing in light of what happened and what I know now and what I'm doing next and cut all the shit I didn't mean to say. It wouldn't be as true but it would be a better story. And sometimes that's truer anyway.

I miss you, sweetheart. I wish we could go home.

 

* * *

 

You came into the garden today while I was watching the fish and thinking, and thank God I wasn't writing or I might've dropped the notebook in the pond with how quiet you came up. I was going to make a joke about giving me a heart attack but then I looked down and I saw that under the loose pants somebody'd given you to wear you were barefoot. Your long knobby feet dusty from the footpaths and it closed my throat right up and I don't know why. Suddenly I was just so sad I couldn't hardly breathe.

You okay Buck you said, and I said: yeah. I said how are you. Fine you said and you sat down on the bench beside me. The benches in the queen mother's garden are white stone, marble maybe or granite, I don't know rocks. But there you were on that white bench in your black pants and a big loose black shirt like a poet might've worn back in Shakespeare's day and your blue blue eyes and the sun setting behind your head. You looked like something out of another age or from another planet and in a way of course you were. We both are. There was another fading bruise on your forehead but you looked alive and happy and I knew I was going to hurt you but I hadn't yet, and panic came rising up in my throat because I wanted to grab hold of you and keep you like that. Just stay like that I thought. Just stay there for a minute and let me look at you like this. Stay like that. Just stay. But no one can pause forever.

Sam said we should talk you said.

Oh brother I said. That asshole.

Bucky you said, is there something we should talk about.

Just let me look at you I said. Okay you said and it sounded more like a compromise than an agreement but you went still and quiet when I reached for you. My fingers on your skull and my thumb on your cheekbone God almighty I wasn't made nearly strong enough for this. My heart in my throat. Tracing the shell of your ear and all the funny little folds as you breathed in sharp but you didn't move a muscle. I measured your hair nape to crown thinking too short too short and saying nothing. Darkening as you got older and I missed the change. I pressed your temple your earlobe the long muscle of your jaw with the point of it in my palm, up up thumbing the end of your brow and the thin crinkling skin at the corner of your eye as you shut it slow watching through your lashes til the end. Braver without your gaze on me. Beat beat your eyelids dancing so I rested there a while. Blue veins in your pale face just like your ma, both of you looking like ghosts when you were wearied oh Lord sometimes I thought I could see right through you. Not now oh look at you now. Lion of Judah oh you golden thing. Your nose I could crush and kill you; I hate that I know how. Your nose I watched your ma set in the kitchen all of our knees bumping close in the sunset light your sunrise face red on your lip your teeth your sharp chin dripping. Oh your blood on my hands. There's not a bone in your body I don't love I thought stroking over half of them, temporal zygomatic sphenoid maxilla one-two stop-motion slap the back of my hand on your right cheek your heat your downy skin. My knuckles against your mouth when you breathed out lips clicking apart, my heart thump! thump! in my chest oh God the damp backs of my fingers and your eyes still closed tight. I swear I was going to stop then but up you reached for my wrist and held me there.

Bucky you said. Shhh I said let—   Bucky you said and I said let me. Please.

Bucky you said and I closed my eyes. What's going on you said.

I'm going back into cryo I said.

So quiet then I could hear you blinking. The fish in the water and the wind in the trees. A go-away bird calling weirdly across the rooftops.

And then no you said no no no no Bucky you can't please you can't why would you do that did someone tell you to did someone say something please don't do this. I'm doing it I said. Your grip on my wrist hot hot hurting sharp and it was sick but I loved it, loved that it was going to bruise, loved that I was going to carry it with me and wear you into the ice. I'm doing it I said again hoping maybe you'd break it, but you let go and you grabbed my shoulders and I looked at you then shaking in your skin instead of shaking me like clearly you wanted to and I'd never seen you so mad. Your fingers digging in hard and sudden and then you let go and stood up too fast, walking away a few steps with your hands over your face. You dropped them and gasped in a breath and as you let it out ragged and slow I said: I'm doing it. You can't you said. I can I said, I can do anything I want. And just about whispering you said: yeah Buck I guess you can.

It won't hurt I said, Shuri promised it wouldn't. (You didn't say anything.) Steve I said. It's too dangerous. I'm too dangerous. An American got in here two weeks ago and just about brought the whole damn country to its knees now imagine if he'd got ahold of me. Imagine. We've got to get that shit out of my head and this is the best way to do it. Shuri can fix me while I'm sleeping and nobody's in danger.

Sure you said, and what am I supposed to do while you're in your coffin.

Whatever the fuck you want! I said, whatever you did while you thought I was dead, Steve, you know, live, God almighty it's like you—   And I stopped because of the look on your face then and right away I looked anywhere but you because I knew what you were going to say.

I didn't you said, I didn't I just. Kept breathing I guess.

Well I shook my head and swallowed and swallowed and after a while you came back over to that bench and took my hand. My hand and then my shoulder and the side of my neck gripping like you wanted to carry me off in your mouth. Bucky you said, I love you. Simple as that, like it sufficed as an argument. Like it meant what I wanted it to mean. I know you do pal I said. But that doesn't mean you own me.

I know you said.

So you gotta I said, you gotta let me. And you said: okay. You didn't let go of my neck though and a minute later you pulled me down and my head landed on your shoulder. I don't think we'd ever done it that way before. You were the small one and then during the War we didn't, I don't know why. The other guys hugging and shoving each other and sleeping spooned up and washing each other in the rivers all hands on deck, but you had your girl and me I guess I was scared to start in case one day I didn't stop. All that time we lived in each other's pockets and not once did I get my head down on your warm shoulder like there in the garden where everyone could see. What a waste I thought all those years. Moment like that it was easy to imagine all the things I wanted working out, easy to imagine me turning my head and you turning your head and my neck arching back over your arm with the force of you wanting just as bad. If I was braver or stupider I would have. Even now I'm thinking fuck why didn't I; the worst you could've done was said no. Maybe there's a gentler world where I stopped being scared of the God damn consequences for one God damn fucking minute and pulled you down onto me in that garden and maybe instead of saying no you said yes, yes, yes please yes I will yes. But the fact is I didn't and I didn't and then it was too late, the shift of your bones and the shift of my neck and your heart thump-thump before you spoke.

Was that what Sam wanted us to talk about you said.

Not now I said, I'm not ready.

Okay you said. But you'll tell me? When you are?

Yeah sweetheart I said. I promise.

And I put my head back down.

 

* * *

 

Cryo tomorrow. I'm not scared exactly or not scared of what I should be, the needles and the ice and how it feels like wading through molasses in a dream more than it does sleeping, and here I should be hoarding my last few hours of real sleep but I can't. You braved Mowayndu and came to me after dinner and you said is there anything I can do to help? Just don't touch me tomorrow I said. I don't think I can do it if you—   And you sat down on the bed facing me and we sort of fell together and I got my arm around you as tight as I could, and oh Lord the strength of you when you got your arms around me too. I'll never get used to that, sunshine. I know you like the back of my hand but somehow that'll always surprise me. And real small you said Bucky please don't leave me. I'm sorry I said, I have to. And you said: I know.

I guess you know now what I meant when you were leaving. I just didn't want there to be any doubt. You turned to me in the doorway and you said are you sure there isn't anything. And I said wait. Selfish I know but I just looked at you some more knowing I couldn't tomorrow or the ice wouldn't get into me proper and I'd just hang there staring at you not able to rest. I couldn't help it at all when my hand came up and touched your face. Shaking but I guess you could feel that. God I'm so tired of being scared is what I keep thinking over and over and I thought it then too with your eyes on me waiting. My hand on the back of your skull tugging you close and oh you came so sweet. And I kissed your forehead like our mommas used to do a hundred years ago and I lingered like they didn't with my lips on your soft bruised skin.

Bucky you said when I let you go and I said I'll see you tomorrow, sunshine. When you left glancing once over your shoulder I turned and saw Mowayndu standing with her arms crossed looking at me. What I said. She rolled her eyes and flung up her hands all her bangles clink-clanking and she went inside muttering something rude about uncastrated goats.

What a mensch.

Well you asked if there was anything you could do to help. I won't tell you to stay out of trouble because I know that's like asking you not to breathe but you look after Maximoff and you treat Wilson like he deserves and you listen to Shuri when she tells you what's what. If you go back to New York you put a stone on their graves for me and take Sarah some flowers, not lilies she hated those but something nice and loud and bright. If you see Stark tell him I'm sorry. I know it doesn't mean much but I want him to know I don't blame him for trying to cut my head off. And Stevie oh tiger don't blame yourself either. We all of us did our God damn best.

 

* * *

 

There's a story and it goes like this.

Once a long long time ago there lived two little boys. One of them was named Yankl and the other was named Stíofán, or at least that's what their mothers called them in the close dark when they laid them down to sleep. A gute nakht Yankl ikh hob dikh lib, Yankl's mother said, and Stíofán's mother said oíche mhaith Stíofán tá grá agam ort, and it meant the same thing. Good night. I love you.

Yankl and Stíofán they grew up fast and one day their mothers didn't call them Yankl and Stíofán anymore because they were big strong American boys and American boys didn't have names like that. Well they loved their parents and they loved being Americans too so they didn't complain, but sometimes in the close dark they would call each other by the names their mommas gave them when they were small and red and new, until one day Yankl said stop because he liked the sound of his name in Stíofán's mouth too much. We're grown-ups now is what Yankl said although in the eyes of the world they were still just boys.

America didn't think they were boys for much longer and when she needed folks to fight overseas she called up Yankl and Stíofán and sent them across the huge dark waters so far away from their mother and their mother's grave and the earth their skin first touched. Across the huge dark waters they would be trapped and they would escape and they would kill and kill and kill. And across the huge dark waters they would die. Far away from one another they would die and in their icy graves they'd sleep and sleep and dream. Yankl dreamed of Stíofán and Stíofán dreamed of home and they drifted so far and for so long that when they met again they didn't recognize each other. Yankl ran and Stíofán chased him all the way to the ends of the earth until finally Yankl said: you caught me. What do you want? But Stíofán didn't want anything.

Well Yankl wanted something all right and what he wanted was to sleep. When he was trapped across the huge dark waters something happened to him worse than death and the only way to cure it was to die, die and be brought back out of the ice, out of the river, walking free into the night and shedding all his skins behind him. Stíofán didn't like it but Stíofán didn't have a choice. Stíofán was Yankl's friend and he would try to be patient for him, wouldn't he? Stíofán would wait and Stíofán would stay safe and maybe one day Stíofán would come to Yankl and say: I know what I want.

Well here they are in the close dark. Here they are at the beginning of night. A long long time ago their mothers tucked them in and said soft words, magic words meant to chase away the terrors under their beds not knowing what terrors would await them when they grew. Oh those poor mothers. Oh those poor boys. Here we are. The magic words only work in the dark, sweetheart. Come here. Come closer.

A gute nakht Stíofán.

I love you.

 

 

 

 

 

### EPILOGUE

 

Steve doesn't care for Mongolia.

It's not the people, who've been unfailingly kind (except for the one woman who laughed when he asked about the state of the roads this time of year in Dornogovi Province, but frankly she'd been right); nor the food, which is incredible, or even the weather, which isn't any worse than they'd had in France in '44. It's just...Mongolia. Growing up, the sky was a thing Steve had caught in slices, in manageable cathedral-window chunks of blue or gray or black, and it wasn't until Camp Lehigh that Steve saw a glimpse of anything so big he couldn't cover it up with his hand. Here the heavens go on and on and _on_ , and unlike Europe there aren't really any trees or hills to break up the terrifying weight of it overhead. He's going to have to get used to it, though, if it means making a certain somebody happy. Steve pulls out the rugged tablet phone in his pocket, and like the last thousand or so times he's checked, it hasn't changed. The blue dot that means _Bucky_ is still pulsing on the map almost three hundred and fifty miles south-east of the capital, Ulaanbaatar—which is now nearly that many miles back in Steve's own rearview mirror.

So to speak.

The horse he traded his rattletrap truck for in Bagakhangai turns and looks at him as if to say _hey, stupid, we got another ten miles to go before dark, shake a leg_. Steve doesn't care much for the cowboy experience either, but given the choice between the nine hundred pounds of attitude he's riding or getting on a train, Steve'll take the horse. It's not all bad; he could get used to this, he thinks, the bare-bones wide open freedom of it, even if his continually-healing saddle sores and the quiet out here are combining to make him feel a little nuts. But even that's been worth it in the end, because tonight—unless for some inexplicable reason Bucky's removed the tracker he apparently _asked_ Shuri to put in his new arm—Steve's going to see Bucky again. Bucky and the women he wrote about in the notebook.

The _notebook_. Hadn't that been a kick in the teeth. Drifting vaguely into his room after the cryo tube closed, feeling like he'd been hit by a shell, and there they were waiting for him on his bed: one all-to-familiar red notebook printed with a star, and another, nearly as battered, bound in dark brown leather. Fake leather, Steve had realized, when he'd taken a step closer and seen how unnaturally smooth it was under the dings. The sticky-note on the brown notebook had said: READ ME. The one on the red notebook had said: BURN.

Steve hadn't hesitated on that second one, marching into the palace courtyard like a crazy person with his hands full of matches and feeding the goddamn thing page by page into a fire he'd eventually needed help putting out, but all through that night he'd held the brown notebook in his hands, thumbs worrying the edges, the elastic, and never quite working up the courage to open it. It was like a will, Steve couldn't help thinking; a thing you read when someone had died. His ma had kept a diary too, and when she passed he'd put off opening it for so long that one day it'd been too late, and Steve's not certain where it ended up after the war. A museum, an archive, the trash. It doesn't really matter now that he's a fugitive. If Ma had been the person he thought she was, he'd know it all anyway, and if she wasn't, well, he doesn't need to know. But Bucky had _wanted_ him to read the notebook, had left it for him specifically. It'd been Bucky's square engineer's hand on those sticky-notes, not Shuri's elegant script, and that had scared Steve so bad he hadn't slept, cradling the thing in his arms.

And then when he'd started, he couldn't bear to put it down.

Wanda had knocked on Steve's door maybe an hour after he'd finished, and she'd said, “Oh my brother,” and after dragging him up to the beautiful white garden where Bucky'd confessed about cryo only a few days before, she'd laid Steve out in the sun and sat with him for another hour, rubbing his arm, his shoulder—his back, when he'd rolled over and put his face in his hands. Steve hadn't quite been able to cry until Wanda said, “Let it hurt; you're allowed to hurt,” and then he hadn't been able to stop, gasping and shaking in the dirt like a wounded animal. Her powerful hands stroking through his hair. He'd felt the magic in them, tingling hot and electric and pushing against her skin as if it wanted out, the strength of her held back by nothing more than will. She could've torn him apart easier than blinking and he'd felt so protected. So safe. Sam found them not long after, when Wanda was helping Steve sit up and breathe like a human being instead of a bellows, and he said “Aww man, that _asshole_ , I knew he was gonna pull something like this,” and he'd given Steve a great big full-body bear hug, hanging on until Steve was wriggling and swearing and laughing in the garden, in the sun.

The next time Steve couldn't sleep and reached for the notebook in a fit of loneliness, or maybe castigation, it wasn't long at all before Wanda was tapping softly on his door, wrapped up in a big caftan with one of the border folks' blankets around her head and shoulders like the old paintings of saints. _Reading my mind, huh_ , Steve had said, without any malice, and she'd said _I would never_ , like it was life or death, and then less certain she'd said: _You—you project, you know, your mind is very bright, it is sometimes like running away from the tide_ , and he'd let her take him up to the white garden where she said _He used to come here, look, you'll see_ , and they'd watched the fish swimming in the moonlight. Steve had wondered aloud whether they ever slept, and he'd watched Wanda hold her hand out over the water, and after a moment she'd said: _They sleep, but not like we think of sleeping_. And Steve had put his hand on his chest and just—breathed.

Shuri, too, had been kinder and more patient with him than he'd expected or even deserved, haunting her lab and disrupting her work, asking for updates, asking to see her progress, asking to see if there was anything he could do to help. She'd heard in Steve's _can I help_ the thing he wasn't saying, how it wasn't just for Bucky's sake but for his own, a half-desperate cry of _give me work!_ she'd seemed only too happy to answer. When she'd needed a rare material, it'd been Steve she'd ordered around the world, and he hadn't at all begrudged her sending a Dora Milaje or two along with him to make sure he didn't cause an international (or in one case interspecies) incident. Those first few months especially he'd known damn well that he wasn't completely awake, at least as far as his judgment was concerned. Half his head was in Wakanda, sealed under the ice.

Steve'd had this romantic notion going in that he'd spend time with Bucky regularly. Like dates, he'd almost thought. Shuri told Steve the first week that it was a little like a coma, cryo, and that there was every evidence that some deep part of Bucky's brain was still conscious; she'd shown him diagnostic images and Steve had touched the soft blooms of red and green, everything that made Bucky his own person contained in those little flashes of light, and he'd thought: people read to coma patients, don't they? Visit them, talk to them? But after the first time Steve couldn't come back, didn't ask to see the coffin again, because that's what it looked like, felt like, Snow White dead in her glass casket and there wasn't a kiss in the whole damn world that could touch Bucky in there, not his skin or his self or those deeper flickers, whatever they were, whatever parts of him were awake and dreaming.

It'd torn Steve up at first, thinking about Bucky waking up and asking Shuri: did he visit me? and Shuri saying: no. But then Steve had touched the notebook he'd taken to carrying around in his pocket or under his shirt, and he'd thought that Bucky'd be even less impressed if he tortured himself for no reason—tortured himself at _all_. Bucky's tired, disappointed expression looming in his head. What can I do that would make him smile, later, Steve had thought; what'll I have to tell him when he comes out? And Steve had tried to do that, instead. He'd run with T'Challa for a day and a half without pause, to the edges of their enhanced endurance, far into the jungle to collect pods from a tree that only dropped its medicinal seeds once every five years. Shuri'd taught him a game children played with their capes, bouncing the shield-light to make a bridge and trying to make your opponent fall off first. When the river flooded its banks and washed away three homesteads and a mile of fencing, Steve had gone down with half the city to help rebuild. Ayo and Namari'd offered to teach him what they called bull fighting; Shuri'd said: “This I have to see,” and had held a recording bead in her teeth so she could still clap sarcastically. Ayo and Namari had shown up with seven-foot-long staffs and topless, half their usual custom and half an attempt make Steve uncomfortable, but having a nurse for a mother and spending months on a USO train—it didn't fluster him much. What _did_ fluster him was Namari knocking him on his ass in less than a minute. (He'd expected martial arts. “No,” Ayo said, “Ukungcweka is martial arts. Nguni is martial arts. This is just hitting your friends with sticks.”)

It had worked. In fact it'd worked so well that by the time Steve even thought to look at a calendar nearly a year had passed, and to the accompaniment of Shuri making soothing noises about her progress and showing him the half built arm, weirdly vulnerable-looking on her table, Steve had lifted his head up over the proverbial trench and checked the international news. What he'd seen hadn't surprised him in some ways, the same old, same old, people being people, but plenty else had. Folks lobbying loudly against sanctions on the enhanced, for a start, pro bono lawyers swarming under the banner of—Steve had blinked once, twice; rubbed his eyes—Stark Industries. There was a devastating piece of investigative journalism exposing the ATCU as SHIELD 2.0 and just as riddled with corruption as the first go-round. A worldwide coalition of teenagers, enhanced and not, fighting for diversity in their schools. A shaky cell-phone video of T'Challa in Vienna, addressing the United Nations, opening his arms to the world.

Steve had floundered, seeing all of it. Was any of it his fight? Or was his fight here, sleeping, waiting for the magic words that would wake him up? Resolution came from an unexpected quarter. The burner he'd sent Tony in an attempt at détente had rang, and it wasn't Tony on the other end but Natasha, her voice tinny and still recognizable, rough and warm down the line as she asked: are you in? As though Steve could turn her down. They'd followed a rumor of live Chitauri weapons being smuggled into Greece that thankfully turned out to be false, and it'd been good to work with her again, to snipe back and forth across the hold of a jet, trading favors, but _Christ_ he'd shocked himself with how tired it made him, how he'd wanted to go back, wanted to be doing something that wasn't cleaning up the world's messes for a change. The mission had been a cakewalk, and during wrap-up Steve had suspected somebody's hand in it, T'Challa's or maybe even Tony's, but never _Bucky's_ ; he'd barely touched down in Wakanda when Shuri took him aside and said, “It's all done; he left last week. He didn't want you to be here, just in case.” Pressing the phone, the blue dot, into his hand. The shock of it hitting him twice. Sam had been visiting his family and Wanda wasn't due back from a retreat with a priestess deep in Jabariland for another two days, but Steve had thought: _patience_ , and he'd waited. Wanting the whole time to throw whatever he could fit into a bag and run the whole way there if that's what it took.

He'd been so grateful to have waited. Sam had brought back sweet Macoun apples and a jar of New York honey and Steve had realized, counting back, that Shuri must've taken Bucky out on Rosh Hashanah; he would've left before Yom Kippur. It'd hurt, but in a good way, the weird sparkling relief of tearing off a bandage. And Steve was especially glad, too, when Sam and Wanda sat him down and showed him what they'd been doing, where they'd been, the joys in their lives Steve had once worried he'd prevented them from having by dragging them into this mess, and the morning he'd planned to leave they showed up in his room unannounced with gifts: not for him, but for Bucky. _Oh Christ_ , Steve remembers thinking in the direction of the cryo chamber, even though Bucky wasn't there anymore; was probably a thousand miles away already: _See? Don't you see? You're loved. You're so loved_. Steve had felt a wave of sorrow wash over him, and then something so huge and bright and warm that for a breathless moment he hadn't been sure if his body could hold it without collapsing to atoms.

Now, as in the hazy distance something comes into focus that must be, _can't_ be anything other than the encampment, Steve feels that huge fluttering thing rise up in him again, battering at the doors of his heart. Breathe, he tells himself. It's just _Bucky_.

As if 'just' is even close to the right word.

The weathered herder who eyes Steve warily as he rides up to the encampment must be the widow-woman, Octyabr, he realizes. She could be anywhere from forty to sixty, her heavy tunic drawn in tighter at the waist than he would've expected for a mother of four grown women, if Bucky's to be believed. The look she gives Steve as he dismounts is one he remembers all too well from Peggy during the war: _Oh_ _Lord_ _; what's_ this _when it's at home?_

“Sain baina uu, ta?” Steve says, presenting the khadag he bought in Ulaanbaatar and bowing a little. Octyabr puts her fists on her hips. He must've done all right, though, because after only a little staring she comes forward and offers her hands for him to drape the scarf over, and then she says something more complex than what he's managed to memorize off the internet. Steve digs the voice wand out of his pocket and reaches up to tap his bug—(“Eh? Get it?” Shuri had said, handing it to him; “Like a _bug in your ear_?” He'd pretended to throw it at her)—which obligingly translates Octyabr's words with a faint Wakandan accent.

“If you've come to take him away, that will be a problem,” she says.

Steve presses the voice wand to his throat and says, “No, ma'am.” After a pause, the wand coughs up what he really, really hopes is the polite equivalent in Mongolian.

Her squint deepens. “You don't look like a man who knows a great deal about animal husbandry.”

“Uh,” Steve says. “I'm willing to learn?”

Octyabr sniffs. “I suppose you can't possibly be worse at it than he was.” Before Steve can say _Well, I don't know about that, ma'am_ , she adds: “He's over there.”

Steve, alone, walks half a mile out onto the plains; Octyabr'd taken the horse with a no-nonsense expression. The ponies out here are stockier, hairier, and a lot more wary of him than the city horse he'd ridden south, but he moves slow and careful around the edges of the herd and manages not to cause a stampede. Just as he starts wondering if Octyabr's sent him out here on a wild goose chase, he spots an incongruous matte-black hand on a pony's jaw, and as he edges closer, a man's shoulder tucked just behind the thick neck of a shaggy, gray, ancient-looking specimen, its legs spraddled and its back deeply swayed. It's also incredibly fat, a lot bigger around than it is tall—although that's not saying much.

“That pony comes up to your nuts, Barnes,” Steve says. “Quit tryin' to hide behind it.”

The hand tenses against the pony's jaw, bringing it closer for a moment, and Steve feels painfully like he's intruded; their faces tucked close together like they're sharing secrets. Steve can just see the top of Bucky's bowed head, where he's pressing it against the pony's long, coarse mane. Two wild creatures.

And then Bucky steps back, and oh: there he is. Jesus. There he is.

“Go on, _meshugganer_ ,” Bucky murmurs, and swats the pony gently on the flank. It makes an effortful noise and plods off. Steve double-takes at it. That's _the horse_ , he thinks crazily, as if he's meeting someone famous, someone he's seen on television or read about in a book. Which he did, sort of. The Legend of Stinky: Smartest Horse in Mongolia. Because he'd wondered, hadn't he, how much of it Bucky was making up as he went along, embellishing the story like he'd always done in Brooklyn; even in the war, the way the other men did, except Bucky'd only ever done it for things that weren't true to start with. He'd never once padded his kills, and he'd never talked about the things he'd done when they'd sent him out alone—three, four days away sometimes, coming back pale and twitchy, his jokes too loud, his hands white-knuckled on his gun. Bucky looks at Steve, then, and it's just like being on the other end of that rifle.

“You surprised me,” Steve hears himself say. Bucky's eyebrows rise. “I thought maybe you'd hit the coast, that restaurant in Odessa—you seemed pretty attached. Or that nice rabbi in Ivano-Frankivsk.”

“I do,” Bucky says, “The shul, Odessa, wherever; I go all the time,” and when he gestures with his chin Steve follows the line to—for god's sake. What he'd assumed was a third ger is now, he sees clearly, a little Wakandan ship cleverly _disguised_ as a ger. The illusion's probably better from the air. Jesus Christ. When Steve looks back, Bucky's wearing a veneer of smugness that looks deliberate, pasted-on. “His Majesty's a generous guy. Stealth mode in that thing like you wouldn't believe. No UFO rumors coming outta Eastern Europe, so I guess I ain't a wanted man just yet.”

 _Depends who you ask_ , Steve thinks. He swallows, hard. Bucky's even gaze on him and: _Just let me look_ , he thinks, remembering the garden; if he'd only _known_. His heart up in his throat. _Oh_ , he thinks, _don't move_.

“How do—how do you feel?” Steve asks.

Bucky doesn't say anything for a long, aching minute.

And then he says: “Clean.”

“You look—” Steve cuts off, uncertain. He doesn't want to say _well_ , because for all Bucky looks much better than he did before, he still looks exhausted, stretched-thin and somehow diminished; and Steve doesn't want to say _good_ either, because—compared to what? Steve's always thought Bucky looked good, even on the table at Kriechsburg, even in DC when the mask came off, Bucky's handsome face riding strange on that jacked-up battering ram of a body. His eyes the only foreign thing. Later it'd occurred to Steve that was how Bucky must've felt when he opened his eyes in the factory and saw Steve looming over him, stretched into a giant like something in a funhouse mirror. Bucky's hair is longer now, longer than it was in Wakanda, longer than it should be given the two months he's been out of cryo, and Steve realizes they must have taken him out sometimes: to eat, to sleep, to move, to test the arm—to test the programs. Steve's fiercely glad they didn't tell him. He doesn't know if he could have stood knowing when Bucky was going under again.

“I look…?” Bucky prompts.

“Bucky,” is all Steve can seem to say, and then helplessly: “ _Yankl_ ,” and Bucky's carefully composed expression crumbles as though he's been stabbed, soft and wounded and shocked. “Come—c'mere,” Steve says, “Please,” and Bucky takes a step forward like he's winding up for a punch and practically crawls into Steve's arms. When Steve tucks his face into Bucky's neck he can hear the machinery in his arm whirring tinnily away, whatever he has for muscles in there revving up high as he clutches Steve tighter, tighter, following his lead. Steve must be hurting Bucky with how hard he's hanging on. His own lungs are being crushed but it feels like he's breathing for the first time in a year, all the same.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Steve whispers, and feels more than hears Bucky laugh. When they separate it's only enough to look at each other, and Steve wasn't going to—wasn't intending to, not yet, not when they were so brittle, so weirdly new around each other, he wasn't planning to—but as Bucky's visibly drawing the shutters on his own face there's a moment where he's staring at Steve with such a raw hunger that Steve can't— _not_ , can't help the magnetic lean of his own body in space as Bucky grips his elbows bruising-hard and—

Steve should've known Bucky would kiss like this, exactly like this, sweet with just a little bite like sugar crunching between his teeth. Steve doesn't realize he's moved his hands to cup Bucky's face until Bucky's own hands come up to cover them. His fingers slip carefully between Steve's, and suddenly it's too much, lighting down Steve's spine, the brush of Bucky's mismatched fingertips against his palms so dizzyingly intimate he can't help making a noise into Bucky's mouth. Bucky answers in the same animal language. Then he's tugging away and Steve clutches at him, desperate, but Bucky only grips Steve's neck, his jaw; if they get any closer their bones'll mesh. Melt together like a Rodin. Steve can hold his breath for eight and a half minutes but he gasps, still, when Bucky lets him go. An inch or two between them, maybe. Bucky's hot panting breath on Steve's chin.

Breathlessly, Bucky says: “So is this an official visit, or...”

“Who says I'm visiting?” Steve says, and hates how quickly Bucky's face goes carefully blank. “What, you don't have space for a roommate in that yurt of yours?”

Bucky's lips click apart, and Steve can't help it; kisses him again—and Bucky _lets_ him, _Christ_ , opening up for him warm and easy like they've been doing this for years, a lifetime, as if the universe is realizing how goddamn wrong it all was and it's changing their history to suit. Steve could live like this, he thinks, live on it like a fantastic creature from one of Bucky's stories, something that subsists on breath and warmth and nothing else. The only thing that stops him now is a nearby pony snorting loud enough to make him jump.

“How long,” Bucky says, without pulling back at all, almost savage: “How— _when_ , fuck, I gotta know, I know I shouldn't be—”

“Should be ashamed of yourself, is what you should be,” Steve says. “Thinking I didn't mean it? All that time looking at me and you didn't _notice_? Blame's on me,” he adds, when Bucky makes a furious noise, “I shoulda got ahold of some semaphore flags, stripped naked, danced on the goddamn table—” Bucky's growl is halfway to laughter as he shifts closer, but he freezes with his mouth just shy of Steve's. “What?”

“Octyabr's watching us,” Bucky murmurs against Steve's skin.

Steve knocks their foreheads together gently. “She'll have to get used to it.”

“You're really,” Bucky says, “You're really staying? You mean that.”

“If you'll have me.”

“Is that even a _question_ ,” Bucky hisses, clutching at him, “You read that whole stupid fucking thing, you—” Steve pats his breast pocket. “You brought it with you?” Bucky says. “Oh my god. You fucking sap.”

“I tried to get the other ones back for you,” Steve says, “I asked Natasha, but—sorry. Somebody's squirreled them away and isn't telling, I guess. She said she'd keep looking.”

“Oh no,” Bucky says, “Some underpaid government lackey looking at my psychotic ramblings, whatever will I _do_ —”

“They're private, Buck, they were your—”

“If they can even read my writing, more power to 'em.” Bucky rolls his eyes. “They're just words, tiger. I got all the important stuff,” he taps his temple, “Right here. And here,” he adds, patting Steve's chest, grinning hot and crooked.

“And you called _me_ a sap,” Steve says. “Wait—did you mean my heart, or the notebook?”

“Looks like you come as a pair,” Bucky says gravely. “Hate to break up the set.”

“You wrote me a love letter,” Steve says, “You wrote me a goddamn _novel_ ; what did you think I was gonna do with it?”

But Bucky, smiling, just shakes his head.

“I brought you something,” Steve says, shrugging off his backpack and swinging it around. “Well, lots of somethings—Sam and Wanda and Mowayndu gave me gifts for you—”

“Cripes,” Bucky says, “I shudder to think.”

“—and this, we—we thought you'd, you know.” Steve pulls out the slender twist of bubble wrap and newsprint that's been living against his spine for the last few thousand miles. Bucky takes it and starts unwrapping it like he's always unwrapped gifts, slowly, careful not to rip the paper. “She wasn't sure if you'd remember it, and I said you wouldn't forget a thing like—”

Bucky makes an awful gut-punch of a noise. Cradled in his hands in a sea of crumpled newsprint, Steve can just see the edge of the green pewter mezuzah case that used to live at the Barnes's front door, barely tilted because there wasn't room for it on the narrow post. Steve had danced through that doorway with his hand reaching out to touch it so many times that he'd started doing it to his ma's door too, and she'd always laughed when he forgot where he was. _Maybe we should put one up, my duck_ , Ma took to saying the year before she died; _we need all the blessings we can lay our grubby hands on_.

“Where—” Bucky gasps, and Steve says: “Becca says you can keep it if you promise to call her once a week. I wouldn't disappoint her, Buck—she might be ninety-five, but she still has her pilot's license. I'm pretty sure she'd fly here just to get you in a headlock if you piss her off.”

Bucky reaches out for him without even looking up from the mezuzah, grasping at the air blindly. Steve gets an arm around his shoulders and tugs him in close, pushing his nose into Bucky's hair and breathing deep. He smells, unsurprisingly, like sweat and horse.

“I'm sorry I didn't tell you in Wakanda,” Steve says. “Until I read the notebook I assumed you knew she was still kicking.”

“No, I—I'm glad,” Bucky says unsteadily, “I'm—god, if I'd known, if she'd died while I was in cryo, I—” He cuts off. Soft, barely more than breath, he whispers: “Baruch Hashem.”

“The scroll's new, I hope it's okay,” Steve says, as Bucky lifts the case. “It's...” Steve closes his mouth as Bucky brings the scroll to his nose and sniffs it, his eyes going glassy for a moment before he says, distantly, “Jordan?” Clearer: “Oh. Yisroel,” and he looks at Steve. “You went to Israel for me?”

Steve shrugs. “It was on my way. Sort of.”

“You weirdo,” Bucky says, grinning. “Where the hell am I supposed to put this? I sleep with the _livestock_.”

“Guess it's time for us to build our own ger,” Steve says. Bucky, looking startled, bites his lip. “I'll do a lot of things for you, Barnes, but I'm not kissin' on you while there's sheep watching, that's for damn sure.”

“Just sheep? The horses are all right, then?”

“Special circumstances.”

“God,” Bucky says, “ _Fine_ ,” elbowing Steve gently in the stomach; “We can build a designated Necking Yurt, you wuss. How long's it gonna take to beat the city boy out of you, huh? I'm guessing oh—five, maybe six decades?”

Steve hides his grin against Bucky's ear. Past them, out on the open steppe, Steve can see two people driving goats around the distant edge of the herd. Bringing the animals in for the night. Now that he's paying attention he can hear them, too, the far-off ocean-murmur of their voices; the bells and coins sewn to the taller woman's long coat. Something in his body language must shift, because Bucky turns in Steve's arms to face the same way, and after a moment he raises a hand. The taller woman waves back, a long slow arc over her head. Cupping her hands to her mouth: “Medekhgüi!” she calls, and something Steve can't understand. Bucky shouts something back, then leans hard against Steve, laughing, when she responds. Steve laces his fingers over Bucky's diaphragm just to feel it, feel the laughter where it starts, the lived-in-ness of him in this, his second or third or tenth body, the place he's had to learn to move into over and over, shoring the posts, re-painting the walls. _You're the bravest man I know_ , Steve wants to say to him, some time in the future, when he thinks he can manage to squeeze it out around the joy constricting his throat: _You wrote all the time about how scared you were but you're so brave. God, you're so brave_. Out there beyond the women the sun's nearing the horizon, starting to go down just the way Bucky described it—the vast, darkening, salmon-belly sky.

“You're awful quiet all of a sudden,” Bucky says. “What're you thinking about?”

 _You_ , Steve doesn't say. _Me. Second chances. Luck. God looking down on us and thinking: finally, whew, that all worked out. It's probably not true but it makes a better story_.

“So how _do_ you pick up a goat?” Steve asks aloud.

“Come on, sunshine,” Bucky says. “I'll show you.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It would be impossible to thank each and every one of the Discord Denizens who helped midwife this thing into being, but in particular I'd like to raise a round of applause for Nendian and Skylar, who drew Stinky Horse fanart _before this fic was even published_ , praximeter for reading an early version and giving me a sanity-check, JHSC for challenging me to write the follow-up, and Them What Screeched Particularly Loud. (You know who you are.) I love you all.
> 
> And thank YOU so much for reading! <3


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